Millions of Americans in Denial About Drug Abuse – November 2002 Annual Survey Finds Millions of Americans in Denial About Drug Abuse
By Yahoo News - Monday October 28, 2002
Copyright: Yahoo News
The 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse provides a more accurate and comprehensive one-year snapshot of the problem of drug abuse in America than previously available. The survey indicated that the number of Americans who could benefit from drug treatment was significantly larger than previously understood.
It also indicated that too many American drug users-more than 4.6 million-who meet the criteria for needing treatment do not recognize that they have a problem. The survey also included for the first time questions about mental illness.
HHS released the annual survey of approximately 70,000 people aged 12 and older today as part of the kick-off for the 13th annual National Drug and Alcohol Addiction Recovery Month observance. It is important to note that because of the year-to-year variations in Household Survey data, conclusions about trends are best made by looking at estimates from three or more years. The Household Survey is conducted by HHS' Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
"As the new school year begins, it's yet another opportunity for parents to talk to their children about the dangers of drugs, alcohol and smoking. And it's important that parents, educators and students work together to keep drugs out of their schools and prevent young people from engaging in drug use," HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said. "When young people do not perceive the risk, use increases. This is harmful to youth, harmful to families and harmful to communities. Nothing less than our children's futures - and their lives - are at stake."
"We have a large and growing denial gap when it comes to drug abuse and dependency in this country," said John Walters, Director of National Drug Control Policy. "We have a responsibility-as family members, employers, physicians, educators, religious leaders, neighbors, colleagues, and friends-to reach out to help these people. We must find ways to lead them back to drug free lives. And the earlier we reach them, the greater will be our likelihood of success."
SAMHSA Administrator Charles G. Curie noted that "Behind these numbers are real children and adults impacted by drug use. Drug use continues to be a serious public health crisis that affects every aspect of our society. We must refuse to give up on people who have handed over their aspirations and their futures to drug use. People need to know help is available, treatment is effective and recovery is possible. This is the message of our Recovery Month observance."
Overall, the Household Survey found that 15.9 million Americans age 12 and older used an illicit drug in the month immediately prior to the survey interview. This represents an estimated 7.1 percent of the population in 2001, compared to an estimated 6.3 percent the previous year.
The report highlights that 10.8 percent of youths 12 to 17 were current drug users in 2001 compared with 9.7 percent in 2000. Youth cigarette use in 2001 was slightly below the rate for 2000, continuing a downward trend since 1999.
Among young adults age 18 to 25, current drug use increased between 2000 and 2001 from 15.9 percent to 18.8 percent. There were no statistically significant changes in the rates of drug use among adults age 26 and older.
An estimated 2.4 million Americans used marijuana for the first time in 2000. Because of the way trends in the new use of substances are estimated, estimates of first- time use are always a year behind estimates of current use. The annual number of new marijuana users has varied considerably since 1965 when there were an estimated 0.6 million new users. The number of new marijuana users reached a peak in 1976 and 1977 at around 3.2 million. Between 1990 and 1996, the estimated number of new users increased from 1.4 million to 2.5 million and has remained at this level.
The measure of perceived risk in the use of marijuana among youth provides an important predictor of drug use, particularly among youths. As perceived risk of using marijuana decreases, rates of marijuana use tend to increase. Perceived great risk of smoking marijuana once or twice a week decreased from 56.4 percent in 2000 to 53.3 percent in 2001. Among youths age 12 to 17, the percentage reporting great risk in marijuana use declined from 56.0 to 53.5 percent.
The number of persons who had ever tried Ecstasy (MDMA) increased from 6.5 million in 2000 to 8.1 million in 2001. There were 786,000 current users in 2001. In 2000, an estimated 1.9 million persons used Ecstasy (MDMA) for the first time compared with 0.7 million in 1998. This change represents a tripling in incidence in just 2 years.
The number of persons reporting use of Oxycontin for non-medical purposes at least once in their lifetime increased from 221,000 in 1999 to 399,000 in 2000 to 957,000 in 2001. The annual number of new users of pain relievers non medically has also been increasing since the mid-1980s when there were roughly 400,000 initiates. In 2000, there were an estimated 2.0 million.
About 10.1 million persons age 12 to 20 years reported current use of alcohol in 2001. This number represents 28.5 percent of this age group for whom alcohol is an illicit substance. Of this number, nearly 6.8 million, or 19.0 percent, were binge drinkers and 2.1 million, or 6.0 percent, were heavy drinkers. In 2001, more than 1 in 10 Americans, or 25.1 million persons, reported driving under the influence of alcohol at least once in the 12 months prior to the interview. The rate of driving under the influence of alcohol increased from 10.0 to 11.1 percent between 2000 and 2001. Among young adults age 18 to 25 years, 22.8 percent, drove under the influence of alcohol.
An estimated 66.5 million Americans 12 years or older reported current use of a tobacco product in 2001. This number represents 29.5 percent of the population. Youth cigarette use in 2001 was slightly below the rate for 2000, continuing a downward trend since 1999.
Rates of youth cigarette use were 14.9 percent in 1999, 13.4 percent in 2000, and 13.0 percent in 2001. The annual number of new daily smokers age 12 to 17 decreased from 1.1 million in 1997 to 747,000 in 2000. This translates into a reduction from 3,000 to 2,000 in the number of new youth smokers per day.
The Household Survey includes a series of questions designed to measure more serious problems resulting from use of substances. Overall, an estimated 16.6 million persons age 12 or older were classified with dependence on or abuse of either alcohol or illicit drugs in 2001 (7.3 percent of the population). Of these, 2.4 million were classified with dependence or abuse of both alcohol and illicit drugs, 3.2 million were dependent or abused illicit drugs but not alcohol, and 11.0 million were dependent on or abused alcohol but not illicit drugs. The number of persons with substance dependence or abuse increased from 14.5 million (6.5 percent of the population) in 2000 to 16.6 million (7.3 percent) in 2001.
Between 2000 and 2001, there was a significant increase in the estimated number of persons age 12 or older needing treatment for an illicit drug problem. This number increased from 4.7 million in 2000 to 6.1 million in 2001. During the same period, there was also an increase from 0.8 million to 1.1 million in the number of persons receiving treatment for this problem at a specialty facility. However, the overall number of persons needing but not receiving treatment increased from 3.9 million to 5.0 million.
Of the 5.0 million people who needed but did not receive treatment in 2001, an estimated 377,000 reported that they felt they needed treatment for their drug problem. This includes an estimated 101,000 who reported that they made an effort but were unable to get treatment and 276,000 who reported making no effort to get treatment.
For the first time in 2001, the Household Survey included questions for adults that measure serious mental illness. Both youths and adults were asked questions about mental health treatment in the past 12 months. The survey found a strong relationship between substance abuse and mental problems. Among adults with serious mental illness in 2001, 20.3 percent were dependent on or abused alcohol or illicit drugs; the rate among adults without serious mental illness was 6.3 percent. An estimated 3.0 million adults had both serious mental illness and substance abuse or dependence problems during the year.
In 2001, there were an estimated 14.8 million adults age 18 or older with serious mental illness. This represents 7.3 percent of all adults. Of this group with serious mental illness, 6.9 million received mental health treatment in the 12 months prior to the interview.
In 2001, an estimated 4.3 million youths age 12 to 17 received treatment or counseling for emotional or behavioral problems in the 12 months prior to the interview. This represents 18.4 percent of this population and is significantly higher than the 14.6 estimate for 2000. The reason cited most often by youths for the latest mental health treatment session was "felt depressed" (44.9 percent of youths receiving treatment), followed by "breaking rules or acting out" (22.4 percent), and "thought about or tried suicide" (16.6 percent).
HHS agencies -- including SAMHSA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) -- play a key role in the administration's substance abuse strategy, leading the federal government's programs in drug abuse research and funding programs and campaigns aimed at prevention and treatment, particularly programs designed for youth. An HHS fact sheet with more information is available at http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/ . Other background and resources are available at the Web sites for SAMHSA (http://www.samhsa.gov), CDC (http://www.cdc.gov), NIDA (http://www.nida.nih.gov) and NIAAA (www.niaaa.nih.gov).
http://news.yahoo.com/
LSD and the CIA – November 2002 Scientist oversaw gave 'acid' to human guinea pigs
By History House - Thursday, 17 October, 2002
Copyright: History House
Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, has been a sacrament of artists, would-be prophets, and other such social chaff since the 1960s. Invented in 1938 by chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann while looking for an analeptic (circulatory stimulant), he found it had no effect on lab animals and forgot all about it. Years later, on the fateful day 16 of April, 1953, he accidentally absorbed a little through his fingertips and went flying on the first acid trip. By then the CIA had a ten-year-old program running, looking for interrogation drugs and truth serums. They'd played with caffeine, barbiturates, peyote, and marijuana. They also tried to get subjects to kill while under hypnosis, rounding out an operation seemingly concocted from the plots of situation comedies. Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain report in their Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD, and the Sixties Rebellion, that by 1953, the CIA had authorized project MK-ULTRA, designed to perfect mind-control drugs during the Cold War.
Conceived by Richard Helms of the Clandestine Services Department, it went beyond the construction of mere truth serums and ventured into disinformation, induction of temporary insanity, and other chemically-aided states. The director of MK-ULTRA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, figured LSD's potential as an interrogative agent paled in comparison to its capacity to publicly humiliate. Lee and Shlain note the CIA imagined a tripping public figure might be amusing, producing a memo that says giving acid "to high officials would be a relatively simple matter and could have a significant effect at key meetings, speeches, etc." But Gottlieb knew that giving LSD to people in the lab was a lot different than just passing it out, and felt the department did not have an adequate grasp on its effects. So the entire operation tripped to learn what it was like, and, according to Lee and Shlain, agreed among themselves to slip LSD into each other's drinks. The target never knew when his turn would come, but as soon as the drug was ingested a ... colleague would tell him so he could make the necessary preparations (which usually meant taking the rest of the day off). Initially the leaders of MK-ULTRA restricted the surprise acid tests to [their own] members, but when this phase had run its course they started dosing other Agency personnel who had never tripped before. Nearly everyone was fair game, and surprise acid trips became something of an occupational hazard among CIA operatives.... The Office of Security felt that [MK-ULTRA] should have exercised better judgment in dealing with such a powerful and dangerous chemical. The straw that broke the camel's back came when a Security informant got wind of a plan by a few [MK-ULTRA] jokers to put LSD in the punch served at the annual CIA Christmas office party ... a Security memo writer... concluded indignantly and unequivocally that he did 'not recommend testing in the Christmas punch bowls usually present at the Christmas office parties.'
The in-house testing phase now over, MK-ULTRA decided to use the drug surreptitiously in the street to gauge its effects. They contract-hired George Hunter White, a narcotics officer, to set up Operation Midnight Climax, according to Lee and Shlain, "in which drug-addicted prostitutes were hired to pick up men from local bars and bring them back to a CIA-financed bordello. Unknowing customers were treated to drinks laced with LSD while White sat on a portable toilet behind two-way mirrors, sipping martinis and watching every stoned and kinky moment." Lee and Shlain go on to comment, "when [White] wasn't operating a national security whorehouse," White threw wild parties for his "narc buddies" with his ready supply of prostitutes and drugs. He sent vouchers for "unorthodox expenses" to Gottlieb, and later said, "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?" In case one needs reminding, these claims are backed by recently unclassified information. Yes, Virginia, truth is stranger than fiction.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Major General William Creasy, chief officer of the Army Chemical Corps at the time, felt that psychoactive chemicals such as LSD would be the weapons of the future. He felt that, say, spiking a city's water supply with acid and taking over would be much more humane than firebombing it. "I do not contend," he told This Week magazine in May 1959, "that driving people crazy even for a few hours is a pleasant prospect. But warfare is never pleasant... would you rather be temporarily deranged... by a chemical agent, or burned alive...?" This sounds humanitarian: why kill if unnecessary, eh? Unfortunately, Creasy wasn't all roses and sunshine. Lee and Shlain reveal that
Major General Creasy bemoaned the fact that large-scale testing of psychochemical weapons in the United States was prohibited. "I was attempting to put on, with a good cover story," he grumbled, "to test to see what would happen in subways, for example, when a cloud was laid down on a city. It was denied on reasons that always seemed a little absurd to me."
Major General? And they say the Army is a true meritocracy.... Anyway, not to be outdone by the CIA, the Army Chemical Corps later came up with quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ, coined a super-hallucinogen. It affected individuals for three days, "although symptoms - headaches, giddiness, disorientation, auditory and visual hallucinations, and maniacal behavior - have been known to persist for as long as six weeks."
Dr. Van Sim, chief of the Clinical Research Division, tried all new chemicals himself before subjecting volunteers to them. "Did he enjoy getting high, or were his acid trips simply a patriotic duty?" ask Lee and Shlain. Sim, who had tried acid on "several" occasions, reported, "It's not a matter of compulsiveness or wanting to be the first to try a material." He later described his first experience with BZ: "It zonked me for three days. I kept falling down and the people at the lab assigned someone to follow me around with a mattress." He later received the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service, cited for "exposing himself to dangerous drugs 'at the risk of grave personal injury.'" Talk about lying down on the job....
Some 2800 soldiers were subsequently exposed to BZ, most of them knowingly. Air Force enlisted man Robert Bowen noted one paratrooper temporarily lost all muscle control and later seemed mad: "The last time I saw him he was taking a shower in his uniform and smoking a cigar." We find that an acceptable alternative to a nuclear arsenal around here, but feel it might behoove the Government to stop abusing its own army and direct its efforts exclusively to those, say, in middle management positions.
http://www.historyhouse.com/
Sex, Drugs & the CIA – November 2002 Sex, Drugs & the CIA
By latimes - Thursday, 17 October, 2002
Copyright: latimes
James Bond had Q, the scientific wizard who supplied 007 with dazzling gadgets to deploy against enemy agents. The Central Intelligence Agency had Sidney Gottlieb, a Bronx-born biochemist with a PhD from Caltech whose job as head of the agency's technical services division was to concoct the tools of espionage: disappearing inks, poison darts, toxic handkerchiefs.
Gottlieb once mailed a lethal handkerchief to an Iraqi colonel and personally ferried deadly bacteria to the Congo to kill Prime Minister Patrice Lamumba. It wasn't his potions that eventually did in the two targets, but Gottlieb, once described by a colleague as the ultimate "good soldier," soldiered on.
Poisons and darts were not his sole preoccupation during 22 years with the CIA. He labored for years on a project to unlock and control the mysterious powers of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. Could it be a potent spy weapon to weaken the minds of unwilling targets? In the 1950s and 1960s, answering that question was one of Gottlieb's missions in MKULTRA, the code name for the agency's secret experiments to probe the effects of mind-altering drugs. Chief among them was LSD, discovered by Dr. Albert Hofman, a Swiss chemist, in 1943.
By the early 1950s, the CIA, fearful of LSD falling into Soviet hands, had cornered the market on the drug, which in minute doses could produce overwhelming sensations ranging from kaleidoscopic acuity to temporary insanity. The agency also started to fund research, covertly funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to academics in prestigious institutions around the country who tried the drug themselves and reported the results to Gottlieb.
Gottlieb and his associates in MKULTRA also took LSD "trips," although the concept of tripping would not enter the American lexicon for another decade. They laced coffee with LSD and served it to each other without warning, then observed each other's reactions. Later Gottlieb expanded the field tests to subjects outside the agency -- drug addicts, prostitutes, prisoners, mental patients -- people who were unlikely to complain and even less likely to be believed if they did. Among the dosed were hookers and their clients in a CIA-sponsored brothel in San Francisco, later the epicenter of the LSD explosion.
One human guinea pig was subjected to an astounding 77-day trip. Some subjects suffered chronic mental problems after being dosed. One person -- an Army germ warfare researcher -- sank into dark depression and paranoia, leaping to his death from the 10th floor of a New York hotel several days after being slipped an LSD Mickey Finn at a CIA retreat. The CIA covered up its role in his demise for two decades, and barely reprimanded Gottlieb.
In the early 1960s, Gottlieb was promoted to the highest deputy post in the technical services operation. By 1967, he had risen to the top of the division, guided by his longtime CIA mentor, Director Richard Helms. At that time, LSD was not a secret anymore. While the CIA was still examining the drug's possibilities as a means of mind control, many young Americans were dropping the hallucinogen as a vehicle of mind expansion and recreation. America was tuning in, turning on and dropping out, thanks, in part, to the CIA's activism in the '50s in the name of national security.
It was not until 1972 that Gottlieb called a halt to the experiments with psychedelics, concluding in a memo that they were "too unpredictable in their effects on individual human beings . . . to be operationally useful."
He retired the same year, spending the next few decades in eclectic pursuits that defied the stereotype of the spy. He went to India with his wife to volunteer at a hospital for lepers. A stutterer since childhood, he got a master's degree in speech therapy. He raised goats on a Virginia farm. And he practiced folk dancing, a lifelong passion despite the handicap of a clubfoot.
A malignant, real-life Q, or an eccentric genius whose intentions were honorable and just? Gottlieb led the agency in 149 mind control experiments, of which about 25 were conducted on unwitting subjects. According to the survivor of one victim, the way Gottlieb duped American citizens was nothing but despicable.
Less black and white in his assessment is John Marks, author of the definitive book on the CIA's mind control programs, "The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate.' " Marks sees Gottlieb as an unabashed patriot who nonetheless "crossed the same ethical lines we hanged German doctors in World War II for."
There is also the view of former CIA psychologist John Gittinger, who says his close friend was a gentle man whose actions were widely misunderstood. The agency's LSD experiments bloomed in the era of Josef Stalin and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and "during that time of Cold War," Gittinger said recently from his home in Norman, Okla., "the attitude we had and the agency had was we were still fighting a war. And when you are fighting a war, you do things you might not ordinarily do."
Gottlieb died on March 7 in Washington, Va. He was 80. His family did not divulge the cause of his death.
http://www.latimes.com/
Brian Paddick – October 2002 Brian Paddick
By Rainbow Network - Tuesday 15th October, 2002
Copyright: Rainbow Network
It’s been a rough 12 months for Metropolitan Police Commander Brian Paddick. Despite the news yesterday that he won’t be facing criminal charges over drugs allegations, Paddick will not return to his former job in Lambeth.
Paddick is Britain`s highest ranking openly gay officer, and following drug allegations made by a former boyfriend he has was moved to a less controversial desk job within the force.
Paddick’s career move is now official as he was appointed to implement the National Intelligence Model, the Metropolitan Police`s recently developed blueprint for reducing crime.
Supporters of Paddick claim he is the "victim of contrived allegations" and are demanding his reinstatement.
The next few weeks are critical in the future of Paddick who can now speak without openly about his situation.
In an email to supporters this week, he wrote
"The tabloid newspapers should not be allowed to dictate to the people of Lambeth or the Commissioner who they have as the Borough Commander for Lambeth... Nothing less than being restored to my post as Borough Commander for Lambeth will do. I am taking advice from employment lawyers - Lambeth or bust!”
Brian Paddick- Quick Guide
Who is this guy?
Paddick is Britain’s highest-ranking openly gay police officer. Once described as an "Oxford educated Yard high-flier," Paddick began his career in the police force 25 years ago. Since then he has risen through the ranks and now heads the London borough of Lambeth’s police force. His patch includes Brixton, where he worked on the beat in 1982.
Why is he in the news?
Paddick first became fodder for the tabloids in 2001 when he introduced a softly-softly approach to drug use in Lambeth. Under his scheme, dealers will still be prosecuted, but people found with small amounts of cannabis will only be cautioned and their drugs confiscated. The idea is to divert police resources from administrating time-consuming minor drug-related offences and focus instead on the harder drug and street-crime problem in Lambeth. Home Secretary David Blunkett gave a "cautious welcome" to the scheme.
So who is ‘The Commander’? What’s his interest in anarchism?
‘The Commander’ is Paddick’s screen name on the messageboards of Urban75.com, a website devoted to rave culture and alternative politics. Paddick has developed a respectful following amongst the site’s users, initiating and taking part in debates about the police and drugs in perhaps the only forum where such discussions could occur openly.
On one occasion he said that he found the concept of anarchism “appealing”. His comments were inevitably leaked to the press, quoted out of context and thus began the second media furore. He attended a disciplinary meeting with his boss, Sir John Stevens, and Blunkett blasted his comments as inappropriate.
What has his ex-boyfriend been saying about him? Something about smoking dope?
James Renolleau told the Mail on Sunday that Paddick had smoked cannabis with him on hundreds of occasions. Paddick denied this, but conceded that his ex may have smoked the drug at his home. Renolleau also claimed that Paddick went to gay saunas and had casual sex with strangers. He said that Paddick contravened police rules when the pair met by not disclosing to his management that Renolleau was on bail for theft.
Hmm, do I detect a whiff of homophobia?
In January Paddick complained of being the target of a homophobic whispering campaign against him, his boyfriend and his ex-wife. Paddick has said that although the police force is less homophobic than it used to be, there are still many officers who resent his position as an openly gay commander and would like to see him resign.
Meanwhile the tabloids have been baying for Paddick’s blood for a long time. Richard Littlejohn called Paddick a “bent copper” in the Sun. He went on to say: “Scotland Yard is terrified of being called ‘homophobic’ and consequently has allowed Mr Paddick plenty of slack. [But] We want Robocop, not one of the Village People…Not so much ‘Hello, Hello, Hello’ as ‘Hello, Sailor’.” Even Janet Street-Porter recognised that Paddick has become “a focus for homophobic elements in the media.” She said: “What we are seeing is gay-bashing disguised as reporting in the public interest.”
What happens now?
Paddick said that he has the overwhelming support of his officers in Lambeth as well as the local people. He wants to get back to work in Lambeth despite being moved to a new post working with the National Intelligence Model. He is currently considering his next move.
http://www.rainbownetwork.com/
Dutch drug policy fact sheet – September 2002 Dutch drug policy fact sheet
By Justitie Fact Sheets - Sept 18 2002
Copyright: Justitie Fact Sheets
DUTCH DRUGS POLICY
What is this fact sheet about?
This fact sheet provides information about:
The main aim
Dutch society
The basic principles of the Opium Act
Indictable offences and maximum penalties
Investigations and prosecutions policy
The burgomaster may order a coffee shop to be closed
International cooperation
Results of efforts to counter drug trafficking
Safety and public order
Care
Prevention
Results of public health policy
Research and monitoring
Further information
The main aim
The main aim of Dutch drugs policy is to protect the health of individual users, the people around them and society as a whole. Priority is given to vulnerable groups, and to young people in particular. Policy also aims to restrict both the demand for and supply of drugs. Active policies on care and prevention are being pursued to reduce the demand for drugs, while a war is being waged on organised crime in an attempt to curb supplies. A third aim of policy is to tackle drug-related nuisance and to maintain public order. The Netherlandsnow has twenty years' experience of working with these policies on drugs.
Given the importance of an integrated approach, responsibility for drugs policy is borne by a number of ministries. The Ministry of Justice is responsible for matters falling within the scope of criminal law and the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport for policy on prevention and care services and for coordinating drugs policy as a whole. The Ministry of the Interior is responsible for matters relating to local government and the police. An integrated approach to drugs policy has been adopted at local level too.
Dutch society
In order to appreciate the Dutch approach to the drugs problem, certain characteristics of Dutch society must be kept in mind. The Netherlands is one of the most densely populated, urbanised countries in the world. It has a population of 15.5 million, occupying an area of no more than 41,526 km2. The Netherlands has a long history as a country of transit: Rotterdam is the largest seaport in the world, while the country has a highly developed transport sector. The Dutch firmly believe in the freedom of the individual, with the government playing no more than a background role in religious or moral issues. A cherished feature of Dutch society is the free and open discussion of such issues. A high value is attached to the wellbeing of society as a whole, as witness the extensive social security system, and the fact that everyone has access to health care and education.
The basic principles of the Opium Act
Regulations on drugs are laid down in the Opium Act. The Act draws a distinction between hard drugs, (e.g. heroin, cocaine and XTC) which pose an unacceptable hazard to health, and soft drugs (e.g. hashish and marihuana), which constitute a far less serious hazard. The possession of drugs is an offence. However, the possession of a small quantity of soft drugs for personal use is a summary, or minor, offence.
Importing and exporting drugs are the most serious offences under the provisions of the Opium Act, although manufacturing, selling and attempting to import drugs are also offences. As is the case in other countries, the cultivation of hemp is prohibited, except for certain agricultural purposes (e.g. to form windbreaks, and for the production of rope). New legislation is currently being drafted to raise the maximum penalty for commercial hemp production from two to four years' imprisonment.
On the principle that everything should be done to stop drug users from entering the criminal underworld where they would be out of the reach of the institutions responsible for prevention and care, the use of drugs is not an offence.
Indictable offences and maximum penalties
The maximum penalty for importing or exporting hard drugs is 12 years' imprisonment and a fine of 100,000 guilders. Anyone found in possession of a quantity of hard drugs for personal use is liable to a penalty of one year's imprisonment and a fine of 10,000 guilders. The maximum penalty for importing or exporting soft drugs is four years' imprisonment and a fine of 100,000 guilders. Habitual offenders are liable to a maximum penalty of 16 years' imprisonment and a fine of 1,000,000 guilders. Moreover, offenders may be deprived of any advantage gained from the offence.
Investigations and prosecutions policy
As is the case in many other countries, the expediency principle is applied in Dutch policy on investigations and prosecutions. This means that the public prosecutor may decide not to institute prosecution proceedings if it is in the public interest. The highest priority is given to the investigation and prosecution of international trafficking in drugs; the possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use is accorded a much lower priority. Anyone found in possession of less than 0.5 grammes of hard drugs will not generally be prosecuted, though the police will confiscate the drugs and consult a care agency.
The expediency principle is applied to the sale of cannabis in coffee shops in order to separate the users' markets for hard and soft drugs and keep young people who experiment with cannabis away from hard drugs.
The sale of small quantities of soft drugs in coffee shops (which are not allowed to sell alcohol) is therefore technically an offence, but prosecution proceedings are only instituted if the operator or owner of the shop does not meet the following criteria:
no more than five grammes per person may be sold in any one transaction;
no hard drugs may be sold;
drugs may not be advertised;
the coffee shop must not cause any nuisance;
no drugs may be sold to minors (under the age of 18), nor may minors be admitted to the premises.
The burgomaster may order a coffee shop to be closed.
While the Opium Act is designed to tackle drug trafficking directly, a number of measures have been taken to counter the problem indirectly, such as legislation which makes it easier to investigate and confiscate the proceeds of drug trafficking and prevent money laundering. Dutch banks, for instance, are obliged to report any unusual financial transactions. Since 1995, legislation has been in force which enables monitoring of the trade in precursors (i.e. substances which are not in themselves illegal but which may be used in the manufacture of drugs).
International cooperation
Those factors which have made the Netherlands into an attractive transit country for legitimate traders unfortunately apply equally to traders in illegal products. The government is making every effort to counter the illicit use of the Dutch infrastructure. In March 1995 controls were abolished at the internal borders of the Schengen countries, i.e. the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Spain and Portugal. As a result, controls at the external borders have been stepped up:
customs and police officers and members of the Royal Military Police have formed a special drugs squad at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to combat drug smuggling;
a special scanner is used to screen containers held in terminals in the port of Rotterdam. Similar equipment will also be purchased for the port of Amsterdam and Schiphol Airport. In combination with the successful risk analysis system developed by the Dutch customs authorities, the scanner has increased the chance of finding drugs concealed in containers. Close cooperation has been established between the customs authorities of the EU member states;
the police and criminal justice authorities in the Netherlands, France and Belgium are working closely together to counter drug tourism and drug couriers operating on the route between Lille, Antwerp, Hazeldonk and Rotterdam;
agreements have been concluded with Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg on police cooperation, and with France on cooperation between the customs authorities. Exchanges are organised between French and Dutch police and customs officers and public prosecutors;
Dutch drug liaison officers are stationed in a number of countries and police officers from other countries have been posted to embassies in the Netherlands to act in the same capacity;
a special team has been formed to tackle the production of and trade in synthetic drugs.
Results of efforts to counter drug trafficking
351 kg of heroin were confiscated in 1995. The Netherlands is not a major transit country for heroin and most consignments that are confiscated come through other European countries.
In 1995, 4,851 kg of cocaine were confiscated - 23% of the total amount confiscated in the EU in that year. In 1994, 215 kg of amphetamines were confiscated, in addition to 143,000 pills containing other synthetic drugs (mainly MDMA, MDA and MDEA). 17 illegal laboratories for the production of synthetic drugs were dismantled in 1995, while a total of 50 were dismantled in the EU in the same year. In 1995 too, 549,337 hemp plants and 332 tonnes of cannabis were confiscated - 44% of the total amount confiscated in the EU in that year. In 1994, 323 illegal hemp nurseries were dismantled. With these confiscations, the Netherlands occupies a leading position in the international war on drugs.
Safety and public order
The number of coffee shops has increased, and some have given rise to considerable nuisance, while some have links with criminal organisations. For these reasons, the Dutch government has decided to tighten up controls.
Policy on coffee shops is largely decided at local level - by the local authorities, the police and the public prosecutions department. The municipalities have gained wider powers to tackle the problem of nuisance by limiting the number of coffee shops operating within their district. As a result, the past 18 months have witnessed an 11% drop in the total number of coffee shops. This vigorous policy will continue to be pursued until the number of coffee shops has reached the minimum at which the objective of separating the markets can be achieved.
Liveable conditions and safety are a high priority in the major cities. In the past four years, the Netherlands has invested an extra NLG 60 million in projects to tackle drug-related nuisance and in facilities for the treatment and rehabilitation of the addicts who cause it. Addicted offenders are now given the option of detoxification treatment or serving a prison sentence.
Drug tourism gives rise to serious nuisance, and efforts to counter it have been accorded a high priority. Agreement has been reached with France on a simplified transfer procedure for drug tourists, while foreign drug tourists may be expelled from the country. One of the objectives of reducing the number of coffee shops and the quantity of cannabis that may be sold is to counter drug tourism. From time to time, investigations will be conducted targeting foreigners who export quantities for sale in their own countries.
Care
The protection of the health of drug users is a major priority, and a wide range of facilities are available. The Netherlands spends more than NLG 300 million a year on facilities for addicts. Over half of this amount is used to combat the drug problem. There are 12 clinics for the treatment of addicts, and their capacity has been increased, from 500 places in 1980 to 961 in 1995.
In the past ten years, care services have become increasingly accessible. They now reach an estimated 75% of all addicts. Their aim is to reach as many addicts as possible to assist them in efforts to rehabilitate, or to limit the risks caused by their drug habit. Social rehabilitation is an essential element.
To achieve these aims, an extensive network of services has been established. Methadone programmes enable addicts to lead reasonably normal lives without causing nuisance to their immediate environment, while needle exchange programmes prevent the transmission of diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis B through infected needles. The services also provide counselling.
Prevention
Prevention plays an important role in Dutch drugs policy. Schools in particular are targeted in efforts to discourage drug use, while campaigns are conducted in the mass media to reach the broader public. In late 1996, a campaign was launched to counter the use of cannabis, while XTC will be the subject of a similar campaign in early 1997.
The objective of these campaigns is to discourage the use of cannabis and XTC. The use of XTC is particularly popular among young people attending raves and discos. In 1995, to prevent accidents occurring during such large-scale events, municipalities were issued with guidelines on ways of maintaining public order and safety and limiting health risks, which many now apply when issuing licences. As a result, far fewer accidents now occur during these events.
Results of public health policy
There were 2.4 drug-related deaths per million inhabitants in the Netherlands in 1995. In France this figure was 9.5, in Germany 20, in Sweden 23.5 and in Spain 27.1. According to the 1995 report of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction in Lisbon, the Dutch figures are the lowest in Europe. The Dutch AIDS prevention programme was equally successful. Europe-wide, an average of 39.2% of AIDS victims are intravenous drug-users. In the Netherlands, this percentage is as low as 10.5%.
The number of addicts in the Netherlands has been stable - at 25,000 - for many years. Expressed as a percentage of the population, this number is approximately the same as in Germany, Sweden and Belgium. There are very few young heroin addicts in the Netherlands, largely thanks to the policy of separating the users markets for hard and soft drugs. The average age of heroin addicts is now 36.
In most EU countries, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden and the Netherlands, the use of cannabis has increased in the past few years. A similar trend is, unfortunately, discernible with regard to synthetic drugs. Evidently, international youth culture has more influence on the use of these substances than government policies. International cooperation is therefore vital if this problem is to be tackled.
Research and monitoring
Though Dutch policies in the field of health protection have been relatively successful, some adjustments are needed. The nature of the drugs problem is constantly changing and a ceaseless effort must therefore be made to seek the best means of limiting the damage drugs can cause to health. Monitoring (following and recording trends) as well as scientific research are therefore essential if an adequate response is to be given when new risks emerge.
The Netherlands occupies a leading position internationally in research and monitoring, as witness the 1995 report of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction in Lisbon. A national drugs monitoring system will be set up in the course of 1997.
To supplement the European Monitoring Centre's work, a number of international comparative studies have recently been conducted to analyse the extent of the drugs problem and the policies pursued. Studies were published on the policies pursued on cannabis in the Caribbean, Germany, France and the United States, and these were compared with Dutch policy. A study was also conducted of policy on hard drugs in France. A bilateral study of the situation in Sweden and the Netherlands is currently under preparation.
An extensive study has been launched of the nature and extent of XTC use, the results of which will be published in the spring of 1997. The study will examine factors such as the pharmacological and toxicological effects of this drug, as well as its social and epidemiological impact.
Policies are continually amended in response to such studies.
Further information
The following fact sheets are available on Dutch drugs policy:
Cannabis policy
Hard drugs policy - Opiates
Hard drugs policy - XTC
Care services for addicts
Education and prevention - Alcohol and drugs
Policy on drug-related nuisance - (under preparation)
These fact sheets can be ordered from:
Trimbos Institute
Netherlands Institute of Mental Health and Addiction
P.O. Box 725
3500 AS Utrecht
The Netherlands
Tel.: 31-30-2971100
Fax.: 31-30-2971111
http://www.minjust.nl:8080/index.htm
2C-T-7’s Bad Trip – September 2002 2C-T-7's Bad Trip
By East Bay Express - Thursday September 5 2002
Copyright: East Bay Express
Sasha Shulgin invented 2C-T-7. Then he published the recipe. It was only a matter of time before his drug turned up on the tongues of non-scientists.
In the beginning, Alexander Shulgin created 2C-T-7, and it was good. Shulgin has dedicated his life to the idea that psychedelics can be used to explore the potential of the human mind, and of all the many drugs he has sampled, 2C-T-7 was one of his personal favorites. "If all the phenethylamines were to be ranked as to their acceptability and intrinsic richness, 2C-T-7 would be right up there near the top," he wrote of his 1986 invention. It was a glowing statement from the man believed to have consumed a wider variety of drugs than anyone else on the planet.
In his fifty-plus years as a chemist, the genial, wild-haired Shulgin, who is better known to his friends and admirers as "Sasha," has become a renegade scientific folk hero responsible for bringing more than two hundred new drugs into the world. Timothy Leary once called Shulgin and his wife Ann "the two most important scientists of the twentieth century." Throughout Shulgin's career, which has included stints as a UC Berkeley instructor and expert witness at Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) trials, Shulgin's work has been marked by his special love for psychedelics. Nowadays he often refers to them by the terms "phenethylamines" or "tryptamines," concerned as he is by the connotations of hippie excess attached to the word "psychedelic."
Shulgin does not design drugs for the commercial market. His inventions exist primarily on paper and in controlled laboratory quantities. Also known as "research drugs," they have never undergone widespread testing and often have been sampled only by Shulgin and Ann, his partner in chemical exploration. While it is legal for Shulgin to invent them in the lab, it's not legal for any of his inventions to be manufactured, sold, or consumed as so-called "analogues" designed to mimic the effects of illegal narcotics. But despite the stringency of the laws that govern such drugs, 2C-T-7 was not destined to stay confined to the Shulgins' Lafayette lab forever.
In 1991, the couple published the first in a series of 800-page books that included directions for synthesizing a total of more than 200 chemical compounds, including 2C-T-7. PIHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (the acronym stands for Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) was a unique book by any standard, weaving together lab procedure, highly personalized accounts of each compound's creation, and Sasha and Ann's own love story, as told in the alternating voices of two not-quite-fictional characters named Shura and Alice Borodin. It was followed in 1997 by TIHKAL: The Continuation (the "T" is for Tryptamines). Alternately hailed as invaluable contributions to the scientific world or derided as cookbooks for amateur pharmacologists searching for a novel high, the massive tomes found a ready audience among establishment and underground chemists. PIHKAL, now in its fifth printing, has sold about 35,000 copies, TIHKAL about 12,000. Recipes and commentary from both books are posted all over the Internet.
It was only a matter of time until the compounds Shulgin described in his books began turning up on the tongues of people not tasting them in the name of science. The path by which 2C-T-7 went from research to recreational drug is not terribly difficult to divine. In 1999 it made its first commercial appearance in Holland's drug-dealing smart shops in both tablet and powder form. It was given the street name "Blue Mystic," perhaps in order to differentiate it from its chemical cousin, another Shulgin creation named 2C-T-2. By 2000, 2C-T-7 had acquired limited popularity in the United States, along with the street names "beautiful," "7-Up," and "tripstasy."
The drug acquired a reputation for its mescaline-like properties, which were said to produce an intense yet clearheaded trip with flowing visual effects. But the "trip reports" posted on drug-related Web sites such as The Vaults of Erowid (http://www.erowid.org/) and The Lycaeum (http://www.lycaeum.org/) also told a more complicated story. While many users praised the drug's powerful visual effects and the strong feelings of well-being it produced, others urged caution, complaining that 2C-T-7 was extremely painful to inhale when taken nasally, and that it could cause a host of unpleasant side effects including nausea, vomiting, muscle tension, body tremors, panic attacks, and violent episodes. Because individual responses varied so widely, users suggested the drug was highly dose-sensitive and that a bad trip could be triggered by mismeasurement, a too-generous dose, or 2C-T-7's interaction with other drugs. Titles of these Web site trip reports show the complete range of experience: from "Extremely Euphoric" and "Shiny Things Are Fun" to "Aliens Reprogrammed My Brain" and "2C-T-7 and MDMA, A Dangerous Combo."
By October 2000, wary drug users had another reason to pass on 2C-T-7: a twenty-year-old casualty from Norman, Oklahoma named Jake Duroy. According to an announcement posted on Erowid, Duroy died after taking thirty-five milligrams of the drug. Duroy snorted the drug, which multiplies its effect well beyond that of the ten- to thirty-milligram oral dose that Shulgin had suggested in PIHKAL would be sufficient for most people. Duroy's death was both frightening and violent; about an hour after taking the drug, he became extremely agitated, and began yelling about evil spirits. A half-hour later he was convulsing, vomiting, and bleeding heavily from his nose; the coroner later found a large edema in his lung.
Two more deaths were soon linked to 2C-T-7. In April 2001, the staff at Erowid posted the news that an acquaintance of theirs, a 24-year-old Web designer from Seattle, died after swallowing an unknown quantity of 2C-T-7 in conjunction with 200 milligrams of Ecstasy. Although his name wasn't released to the media, the report seems reliable because of his personal connection to the Erowid staff.
In the same month, Joshua Robbins, a seventeen-year-old from Cordova, Tennessee died after snorting between thirty and thirty-five milligrams of 2C-T-7, not long after taking several other stimulant drugs. According to Rolling Stone, which ran an article on Robbins' death, in the twelve hours before he died Robbins also had consumed Ecstasy, nitrous oxide, and a "mini-thin" containing ephedrine and guaifenisen. His final hours were agonizing: Robbins' friends recall that he vomited heavily, became panicky and violent, and spent the last few moments of his life yelling, "This is stupid! I don't want to die!"
Media coverage has misrepresented 2C-T-7 as a quasi-legal toxic trend that is sweeping the nation. But 2C-T-7 has never really shown signs of becoming a sweeping drug phenomenon. For starters, it's not particularly easy to make. Its use also seems to have been geographically scattered; it never appeared with any great prevalence in the Bay Area. Members of an Oakland-based group called SHARE Project, a group that does health education work at raves, report that they've scarcely seen it. "It's not a big concern here," says media liaison Le Liu. By the beginning of 2001, even many of Holland's smart shops voluntarily agreed to stop selling Blue Mystic, the same year that at least two online suppliers stopped selling the chemical.
In fact, 2C-T-7 may well have been on the downswing of its popularity last January when Rolling Stone published the article on Robbins, touting it on the cover as "The New (Legal) Killer Drug." It was an unfortunate headline choice -- especially for a publication that very likely gave 2C-T-7 its first mass-media exposure -- since the drug is certainly not, as the magazine claims, "perfectly legal."
Some observers worry whether the recent media attention paid to 2C-T-7 will produce an upsurge of morbid interest from the sort of users who can read about a gory death and still want to sample the powder that caused it. "It just goes along with the attraction of it being illegal and dangerous," Liu says. Several Web sites even have featured debates over whether 2C-T-7 itself cost the young men their lives, or whether their deaths were caused by taking too much of too many drugs too fast.
In any case, it is an ironic and flamboyant fate for a chemical whose inventor's own approach to drug exploration is so profoundly different from that of the rave culture that is making his creation famous.
The media has occasionally portrayed Sasha Shulgin as a drug-guzzling mad scientist, but it is hard to see him as a nefarious figure, although he certainly has an iconoclastic bent and mischievous wit. Now in his seventies, Shulgin is bearded, bespectacled, and sandal-clad. Both Shulgins sport leonine masses of hair, although Sasha's is more to the silver and Ann's more to the gold. A rather charming passage in PIHKAL has Shulgin theorizing that he unconsciously willed his hair completely white by age thirty in order to enhance his appearance as a "harmless old professor" which, as he put it, "can be useful at times when you do the kind of work I do." Ann, reclining in an easy chair with a cigarette in hand, is the handbrake to his runaway train, gently rebuking her husband when he embarks upon conversational detours liable to confuse visitors without a PhD in chemistry.
And there are many visitors. Their hillside Lafayette home, fondly referred to as the Farm, is something of a tourist destination for pharmacophiles. Although the Farm displays little differentiation between lab and living space, the most popular exhibit is a tiny backyard lab where the inventor keeps the classical music cranked up to eleven. The lab is filled with glassware, and a discarded nuclear-magnetic-resonance console lies in the backyard grass like the carcass of some sci-fi dinosaur. Guests are advised to protect their watches from the powerful magnets in one lab, and not to breathe too deeply when trooping through the storage shed, which houses thousands of brown glass bottles of powders and liquids, the combined odor of which lies somewhere between fruit punch and vulcanized rubber with several less pleasant stops in between. The Shulgins keep a strip of yellow police line tape pinned up on the dining-room wall, perhaps as a souvenir of the unwanted attention Sasha's work has received.
Berkeley native Sasha Shulgin's fascination with the relationship between mind and chemical matter began, oddly enough, in the Navy during World War II. A severe infection on his left thumb required surgery. Before he went under the knife, he was handed a glass of orange juice, at the bottom of which he noticed some undissolved white crystals. Convinced it was a sedative, Shulgin drank the juice but resolved to stay alert. He promptly blacked out. Upon waking, he was surprised to discover that the knockout drug had been nothing more than sugar; his mind had tricked itself over the simplest of placebos. Shulgin resolved right then to devote his career to the relationship between drugs and the human mind.
After leaving the Navy, he returned to UC Berkeley to study biochemistry. Reading the works of Aldous Huxley and Henri Michaux, he became intrigued with mescaline, which he tasted for the first time in 1960. "It was a day that will remain blazingly vivid in my memory, and one which unquestionably confirmed the entire direction of my life," he wrote in PIHKAL. "The world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had when I was a child. I had forgotten the beauty and the magic and the knowingness of it and me. ... The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid."
After receiving his doctorate from Cal, Shulgin worked for a decade as a senior research chemist at Dow Chemical, where he was given a good deal of research freedom after inventing a profitable insecticide. It was during this period that Shulgin began a lifelong policy of taste-testing all his work. He began by testing a mescaline analogue called TMA, expecting a repeat of his previous experience. Instead, he was unpleasantly surprised to discover that the TMA produced only feelings of rage. He describes one trip during which he found himself in Tilden Park angrily hurling rocks and sticks. It was a pivotal moment in his development as a researcher; a chemical structurally similar to mescaline had produced the opposite effect. His subsequent work would focus on this very phenomenon, rearranging the atoms of known active substances to produce isomers that might yield different effects.
In 1966, Shulgin left Dow to attend medical school at UC San Francisco. But he only stayed for two years; it turned out he was more interested in learning how the body and brain worked than learning how to repair them. So he set up a home lab and hung out his shingle as a consultant, beginning his curiously interdependent relationship with the DEA. Despite Shulgin's persistent interest in sampling drugs and the agency's persistent interest in stopping people from doing so, the two parties developed a surprisingly close relationship. Shulgin wrote a handbook on the Controlled Substances Act that became a standard desk reference for DEA employees, and he later would serve as an expert witness for both the prosecution and defense in DEA drug trials. In return, the DEA granted Shulgin a license to handle certain illegal drugs, which was subject to a rigorous annual inspection. Shulgin also became a university instructor, teaching classes in forensic toxicology at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University.
Sasha and Ann met in 1978 at a weekly discussion group in Berkeley. At the time, Ann was a divorced mother of four; Sasha's wife of thirty years, the mother of his son, had passed away the year before after a stroke. Ann, who had tried peyote and been extremely moved by the experience, was eager to trip again and pelted the chemist with questions about his work. He soon invited her to the Farm to try MDMA, now better known as Ecstasy (a name they both dislike, since a good portion of what is marketed as Ecstasy is not truly MDMA).
Shulgin had begun experimenting with MDMA as early as 1967. Although MDMA is the drug that made him most famous, it is not his own invention. The compound was created in 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck, only to fall into obscurity. Shulgin helped repopularize its use, claiming that it might have value as an antidepressant since it allowed people to look deep inside their own psyches without reservation. In Ann he found a willing partner in exploration. As a lay therapist, Ann joined the movement of psychologists and psychiatrists who claimed that MDMA was a powerful therapeutic tool that could, for example, help rape victims or war veterans open up to a therapist.
Ann soon became a regular in the most unconventional part of Shulgin's research. Unlike university or pharmaceutical company scientists, Shulgin is his own prime test subject. But one does not survive swallowing untested drugs for more than forty years by luck alone. Shulgin developed a painstaking system. He swallowed only minute amounts of untried chemicals, letting 48 hours go by before boosting the dose, usually by a factor of two or less. He learned his own body's warning signs -- never let your thoughts fall into a rut; never stare too long into a mirror while on MDMA; watch out for anything that provokes jumpiness or sleepiness at a low dose. He developed a scoring system in which the effects of new materials were rated from "minus," or "no effect," up to "plus four," a "one-of-a-kind, mystical, or even religious experience." Once he concocted something promising, he would invite a half-dozen friends to spend a day sampling it with him. This, too, had rules. No one who was sick, on medication, or had taken any other drugs within the previous three days could partake. The group would bring food and sleeping gear for an overnight stay. The safety rules were strict: a hand signal meant the speaker was about to raise a real-life safety concern, each participant could veto group suggestions that might affect their experience, and people not in established relationships were discouraged from sexual behavior. The friends generally spent their time eating, walking in the garden, listening to classical music, and paging through picture books. Like Shulgin, they'd start with tiny amounts of a new drug and slowly boost their doses. Afterward, the participants were expected to share their impressions with Shulgin, who made it clear he was a researcher, not their personal candy-man.
If Shulgin's tasting weekends weren't lab protocol, they certainly weren't wild drug parties, either. "Use them with care, and use them with respect as to the transformations they can achieve, and you have an extraordinary research tool," Sasha Shulgin once said of phenethylamines. "Go banging about with a psychedelic drug for a Saturday night turn-on, and you can get into a really bad place psychologically."
Even as the Shulgins' collaboration deepened -- they were married by a DEA agent in 1981 -- the laws surrounding their work were changing rapidly, largely in response to the behavior of other drug enthusiasts whose experimentations were less scientific. In 1984, the federal government listed MDMA as a so-called Schedule I drug, barring it from future clinical testing as a substance with no medicinal value and a high potential for abuse. The loss to the Shulgins was enormous. They believed a powerful tool was taken from researchers because of the government's overreaction to MDMA's increasing prominence in nightclub culture. Why, they asked, were limitations on medical research being set by the DEA, a law enforcement agency?
The following year, the federal government went even further, passing the Controlled Substances Analogue Enforcement Act as a reaction to the proliferation of designer drugs such as heroin analogue China White. The Analogue Act criminalizes the sale or manufacture for sale of any chemical with a structure or action "substantially similar" to that of a Schedule I or II drug.
In a letter published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, Shulgin complained that the law has a "carefully worded vagueness," which allows the government to arbitrarily decide which chemicals to okay and which to squelch. "By designing the net which has a completely variable mesh size, one can catch whatever fish one wishes to and let escape another fish that is not wanted," he wrote.
Regulators say the law is fairer than that. "I wouldn't say it casts a wide net," says one official from the DEA's Office of Diversion Control, who asked to remain anonymous. "It's a very narrowly crafted law that only affects substances that are not being studied for use as medicines for humans, but are being manufactured or distributed for human consumption outside of approved research, have been found on the street, and which are likely to meet the findings for control under our laws in the future."
In either case, the effect on Shulgin's research was obvious -- the group drug-tasting experiments had to stop. By this time, many of the scientific journals that once had welcomed Shulgin's work were turning away his papers, citing legal worries. Seeking another outlet, the Shulgins published PIHKAL and TIHKAL.
Even though PIHKAL begins with a warning that to synthesize any of its recipes for human consumption is to "risk legal action which might lead to the tragic ruination of a life," and even though more than half of the recipes were previously published in scientific journals, the authors could have faced legal action. They published anyway. Asked why, Shulgin tells the story of Wilhelm Reich, inventor of a "cloudbuster" that he claimed could make it rain, and the orgone box, a device he said could treat cancer. After the FDA charged Reich with fraud for selling an unlicensed medical device, he died in prison in 1957. The court ordered that all of his research be burned, and his life's work was lost. "I can see having maybe two or three people in the higher echelons of the government who may not like what I do, and I did not want particularly to have all of this be seizable and burnable," Shulgin says. "So I published it. Now you cannot get rid of it."
The Shulgins take a long view towards the role of psychedelics in human history. People have used psychoactive substances for thousands of years, they note, and it's unlikely that anyone will stop soon. "People all over the world are trying to fiddle around with chemical compounds and if you close one down, ten more spring up, because it's a fascinating pursuit," says Ann. "Publishing the recipes is an effort to minimize the harm that could come from somebody following the wrong instructions, or maybe no instructions at all, and ending up with a compound that kills him or poisons all his friends." Plus, she adds, the recipes in the books are written in scientific language targeted at experienced chemists. "The complaint that they could easily be made in anyone's bathtub is total nonsense," she says. "No way."
But after PIHKAL's publication, Shulgin's relationship with the DEA changed -- although the agency never took any official action against the book itself. In 1994, the DEA raided the Shulgins' lab. In a chapter of TIHKAL simply called "Invasion," Ann's alter ego describes the raid. She remembers DEA agents and state narcotics officers -- some wearing helmeted biohazard suits -- pulling up in a fleet of vehicles, including a firetruck and a decontamination truck. She also remembers the DEA agents shyly asking the chemist to autograph their copies of PIHKAL.
Ultimately, Shulgin was written up for a series of chemical storage violations that somehow never caught the attention of previous inspectors. At the DEA's urging, he surrendered his Schedule I drug handling license, paid a $25,000 fine, and made some changes to his laboratory to comply with environmental regulations. Shulgin says the loss of his license doesn't affect his inventing at all -- after all, he doesn't need Schedule I drugs for his own research and is not interested in producing analogues of them. "If a chemical turns out to have an action of a Schedule I drug, I'll just publish the damn thing and go on to something else," he says.
But the investigation had a powerful psychological effect. "Never again will Shura work with a sense of absolute freedom," Ann wrote in TIHKAL. "He's had a taste of that particular form of power-flexing peculiar to people who are employed by government agencies. The authorities intended to frighten him and perhaps they even hoped to silence him, but that is not and will not be possible. ... The magical laboratory still stands."
Law enforcement's get-tough reaction to what is clearly a significant American curiosity about psychedelic drugs unwittingly encourages people to sample research chemicals and other exotic compounds, drug-policy-reform advocates argue. "Drug laws are driving people to try drugs they ordinarily wouldn't because they can't get the tried and true, like mushrooms or LSD," writes one freelance drug researcher and Erowid contributor who goes by the screen-name "Murple."
Both sides of this debate agree, however, that once a research drug hits the street, it can mean trouble. Research drugs' lack of prior testing and the legal misunderstandings surrounding them combine to create the worst of all possible scenarios -- a period of heightened interest in an untested substance during which dealers are quick to cash in on a new trend, emergency room technicians are unlikely to recognize the drug in the event of an overdose, and information about safe usage is scarce and anecdotal at best. Little is known about research drugs' side effects, interactions with other drugs, and safe dosages because FDA clinical trials are not conducted on substances that hold no promise of patents and profits for university or pharmaceutical company researchers. So people commonly resort to what Julie Ruckel of the Drug Policy Alliance calls "dancefloor pharmacology," an informal network in which information passes from friend to friend. "It's all word-of-mouth," she says. "Someone took twenty milligrams and it was fine, so they'll tell the next person."
Just about everyone involved in the 2C-T-7 debate agrees this is a dangerous practice. "A small difference in the dose can make a huge difference in the experience," says Liu of the SHARE Project. Other factors, including a person's weight, how much fluid is in their system, and what medications they are taking also can determine how a trip turns out. For its part, the DEA cautions that taking any non-FDA approved drug is a risky prospect. "You don't oftentimes know what the safety risks are, you don't know what the dose would be, what the administration should be," the DEA official says.
Certainly the government collects information on new street drugs, but the generation of partygoers who have been instructed since toddlerhood to "Just Say No" often just tune out government education efforts. "Who wants to be the wet blanket at a party?" sighs Kate Malliarakis, branch chief officer of demand reduction for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "If you've got ten people standing there saying, 'Come on, mellow out, take a chill pill,' and you have a couple of old farts like myself standing there saying, 'This is going to do damage to you,' it's like an old cartoon. Who's going to believe me?"
Liu agrees that government drug-awareness programs have overemphasized the negative effects of drug use, so teenagers have lost faith in them. "You don't want to withhold information from people, especially young people," he says. "If you tell them the whole truth, they're going to be more open to you telling them about the risks. If you only tell them the bad things about drugs, they'll know you're not telling them the whole story. Kids are smart enough to know that you're telling them this information about this drug because people are using it. But they're going to think, 'Why are people using it?' Obviously there's some sort of benefit, so you must be lying."
In the absence of information perceived as reliable, curious drug enthusiasts now often get their information through two channels that owe a great deal to the expansion of the Internet -- online bulletin boards and the studies of amateur researchers. The popularity of Web sites such as Erowid and the Lycaeum shows the breadth of public interest in research drugs; the fact that amateurs have bothered to craft their own studies reveals the depth. Erowid, for example, gets 20,000 page views a day. Both Erowid and the Lycaeum have adopted a tell-it-all philosophy toward both the positive and negative effects of drugs such as 2C-T-7. Their disclaimers don't mince words. "When you take a research chemical, you are stepping out into the unknown, and you could be the unfortunate person to discover a new drug's lethal dose," reads the "Research Chemical FAQ" Erowid site. In general, news posted on these sites is acknowledged to be so far ahead of the curve -- and so readily available -- that regulators are learning to check there first for information about new drug trends.
So far, you could count the number of scientific papers devoted to 2C-T-7 on one hand and still have a finger left over. In 1991, Shulgin published the first report on 2C-T-7 in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. Two years later, another study appeared in the Journal of Ethnomedicine, but it was extremely limited, consisting of only eight test subjects who each took a single dose. The only other studies out there have been conducted by nonscientists who disseminated their results online. One of them, published in the Summer 2000 Bulletin of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies by amateur researcher Casey Hardison, simply surveyed the experiences of 48 people who tried differing amounts of 2C-T-7 at a conference for what he calls "entheogen enthusiasts."
The following year, Erowid contributor Murple posted the results of a larger e-mail survey of more than 400 people who had tried 2C-T-7 in a variety of dosage amounts, both by snorting and swallowing. The results of both studies reaffirmed what already had been posted on Erowid and Lycaeum trip reports. In general, 2C-T-7 produced feelings of lucidity and euphoria, as well as the rare panic attack; neither study indicated a pattern that could show users when to expect which result. The vast majority of those surveyed expressed interest in trying the drug again. Murple's much larger and more systematic survey also documented a high incidence of side effects, with about two-thirds of the users reporting nausea, about half reporting muscle tension, with one-third reporting vomiting and another third reporting headaches. His report also included detailed chronicles of the three 2C-T-7-related deaths, as well as further anecdotes collected from around the world of seizures and blackouts apparently prompted by 2C-T-7.
The most interesting conclusion he drew from his research, Murple says, is that 2C-T-7 appears to be both erratic in its effect and highly dose-sensitive, much more so than other phenethylamines. Why is the difference between a good trip and a nasty one just a few milligrams of powder, he asks, and why are some people so floored by the drug and others barely feel it? While he believes the three connected deaths make 2C-T-7 a bad bet for clinical trials on people, Murple points out that 2C-T-7's apparent volatility makes it a worthy subject for mainstream medical researchers who could come to the table with better funding and equipment than any amateur could. "I think if we could figure out what makes 2C-T-7 so unique, we'd learn something very valuable about the way the human brain works and about the way this whole class of drugs works," he writes. "There is something very unusual going on here, and we owe it to ourselves as a society to find out what."
But not everyone thinks the Internet is a safe place for curious pharmacophiles to be exchanging such research. A recent National Drug Intelligence Center report sparked huge outrage by concluding that Web sites and bulletin boards that post information about the production or effects of illicit substances constitute a "threat" to American youth. "I have trouble with the Web sites because they talk about the here and now, but not the consequences," says Malliarakis. "They do talk about what a bad trip is all about, but not about what it's going to be like five years from now." Plus, she points out, you shouldn't believe everything you read on the Web. "You don't know who's writing this," she says. "Is it all fantasy? You don't know dosages, side effects. If you're on an antidepressant, is it going to interfere with that? If you have a family history of depression and your depression switch hasn't turned on yet in your life, will this be the drug that turns it on? There's so much about the brain that we just don't know."
And if the science itself isn't confusing enough, add to that the fact that a cautious user who checks the law books to see if the drug they're interested in sampling is taboo won't find a new analogue like 2C-T-7 listed by name. "If the government makes a list of things and says, 'These are controlled substances,' in law that means that the things that are not on it are not controlled substances," says attorney Richard Glen Boire of the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics. "The reasonable conclusion is that you're doing something legal." Like other research drugs turned street drugs, 2C-T-7 is "unscheduled" rather than legal. It's a key distinction. In fact, 2C-T-7 is considered an analogue of a Schedule I club drug known as Nexus or 2C-B, another Shulgin invention described in PIHKAL. From a law-enforcement point of view, it is an excellent example of the type of chemical the Analogue Act was created to regulate. It's so new that individual police officers might not recognize it by name, and yet it's clearly being sold as a drug that will mimic the effects of previously outlawed chemicals.
And while 2C-T-7 may never become more than the flavor of the month, its emergence into the public realm also comes at a time of heightened DEA scrutiny of what are loosely termed "club drugs" -- generally synthetic drugs consumed at nightclubs and raves. The DEA firmly believes that club drug usage is on the rise -- for example, they cite a fifteen-fold increase in the amount of MDMA tablets seized by the agency in the last five years. According to the most recent federal National Household Survey on Drug Use, in 2000 roughly one million Americans over age twelve were current users of what they called a "hallucinogen," a category that includes LSD, mescaline, mushrooms, and MDMA.
In this climate, research drugs are sometimes misrepresented by dealers as legal alternatives to scheduled substances such as mescaline or Ecstasy, or sold under the name of better-known drugs in order to boost sales. Because sale of an analogue is only prosecutable if done for human consumption, research drugs are sometimes sold with a wink and a nudge. For example, online catalog JLF Poisonous Nonconsumables -- the source from which Robbins' dealer allegedly bought his 2C-T-7 -- has its disclaimer right in its name. In addition, before site visitors are allowed to do their shopping, they must click on a page-long warning that instructs: "Do not eat, drink, inject, inhale, insert, absorb, snuff, snort, smoke, slam, or ingest in any way. Do not stick, put, or throw into your or another person's mouth, nose, ear, eye, anus, urethra, vagina, or any other orifice or port of entry that may exist on your or another person's body." This cheeky disclaimer didn't sway the feds, who served JLF's owner with a thirteen-count federal grand jury indictment last September and have forbidden him to continue selling several catalog items, including 2C-T-7.
What next for 2C-T-7? If the DEA decides to schedule it, as has been suggested by some press coverage, the process would take six months to a year, during which there would be hearings and public comment. The Department of Health and Human Services would evaluate the drug's risk to public health and likeliness to cause dependency. However, no matter which way the hearing goes, the DEA retains ultimate authority to decide what class a drug will fall into. The agency is notorious among drug-policy-reform activists for listing MDMA as Schedule I after the judge had recommended it be put in Schedule III, which would have allowed it to be used for medical testing. Even if 2C-T-7 remains unscheduled, it will probably become more difficult for dealers to pass it off as legal once it becomes more familiar to local police.
For Sasha and Ann Shulgin, 2C-T-7's transition to street sales has been tremendously disappointing. They've been exceptionally open to answering the queries of just about any media outlet that's contacted them wanting to know more about 2C-T-7, and they've repeatedly made two points clear: 2C-T-7 was never meant to be a recreational drug, and they're not making money off of it, just as they have never made money from the street sales of any of Sasha's creations. "I'm disturbed by the fact that you get someone who wants to make a pile of money and doesn't give a damn about the safety or the purity," says Shulgin sadly. "It's a motivation that I'm uncomfortable with. People using psychedelics, I'm not uncomfortable with it. I consider it a very personal exploration. But I'm very disturbed by the overpowering of curiosity with greed."
There is a passage in PIHKAL that seems to foreshadow the biggest question raised by 2C-T-7's transition from the lab to the dancefloor. In it, "Alice" asks "Shura" if publishing information about his discoveries in scientific journals will encourage people to turn them into street drugs. "There's no avoiding the fact that a lot of idiots who don't know diddly-squat about chemistry are going to go to work to make some of those drugs -- the easier ones -- for sale on the street," Shulgin's alter-ego responds. "And people are going to take them at parties and use them in stupid, irresponsible ways."
Both in print and in real life, when Sasha Shulgin talks about what's become of his more wayward creations, he seems weary and somewhat sad. He's merely planted the tree; he can't help it if people choose to put forbidden fruit in their mouths. "I do not feel responsible," he says. "I think I'm doing more good than harm."
But this is not the first time one of his drugs went famously commercial. In 1967, a research compound he'd named DOM got loose. Shulgin suspects this occurred after he described it in a lecture at Johns Hopkins University. He didn't recognize the street name it had been given -- STP -- and certainly had no reason to believe his chemical was linked with the strange overdose cases that were turning up in San Francisco clinics. Street dealers were distributing STP in twenty milligram doses, what Shulgin calls a "whopping" amount, and users were re-dosing too quickly because they were used to drugs like LSD that had a quicker onset. The result was that STP became known for producing fabulously bad trips. "I was in medical school at the time right above the Haight-Ashbury, and I'd go down Haight Street memorizing for an exam and all around people were stoned on a drug I had made years earlier. It was the strangest feeling," he says. "It took the better part of six months for information to filter into the literature of what it really was, and then I realized it was my compound, and I was very uncomfortable with the fact that this was not what I had intended at all."
Things haven't changed much in the intervening decades. The ascendance of 2C-T-7 has shown that the chemist's creations are still turning up in situations so vastly unlike those sedate weekends on the Farm, and being used in strikingly different ways. The Shulgins say it alarms them to hear about young people taking drugs in large doses, in potentially dangerous combinations, or via methods they never used, like snorting -- especially when the drug in question is something they once liked. "I cringe when I hear about something new like the 2C-T-7," says Ann, "because all of the 2C-T's are really, really nice materials. They're very very pleasant and friendly.
"If we could control the way it was used," she sighs, "this would be a heavenly world."
While he's essentially in it for the thrill of the unknown, Shulgin also believes that some of his inventions might turn out to have medical or therapeutic applications if given further study. As an example, he mentions Aleph-4, a particularly unpleasant chemical that produced a totally emotion-free state. "You couldn't feel sorrow, you couldn't be angry, you couldn't be happy," he says. "You were a piece of cardboard.
"I'm creating tools to study the function of the mind -- not the brain, the mind. And here's a good example -- total lack of effect. That is a rare but real clinical thing, and here's a drug that produces that state. Can't you see the joy I would have by putting a radioactive tracer on it and sticking it into a person who had that medical problem and to another person who is a control who didn't have the medical problem and seeing this goes up here, but that goes over there?
"Ah!" he sighs, his voice dropping lower. "That would be marvelous!"
Another compelling example is a drug called DIPT that is remarkable among psychedelics for its auditory, as well as visual, effects. In fact, after tasting DIPT for the first time, Shulgin only noticed the onset of the drug because he happened to be listening to the kitchen radio, which suddenly sounded terribly out of tune. "I assumed it was probably some little group somewhere," he remembers. "It turned out to be the Philadelphia Symphony, which is very excellent. It was me who was out of tune!"
In TIHKAL, Shulgin had expressed great interest in learning how DIPT might affect the brain's auditory processing centers. And years later, he is still wondering aloud if studying DIPT might have other benefits. For example, could it cast some light on schizophrenia, which usually results in auditory, rather than visual, delusions?
Shulgin doesn't seem likely to stop inventing new compounds, either, and he says he's not looking for anything in particular. "I don't have a holy grail. I'd just like to find something new," he says. "If it's never been made before, of course it's never been tasted before. And if the structure is similar -- not substantially similar, but similar -- to other things that are active, it's so damned intriguing to know if it's going to be active and what it will do. The motive is to satisfy the curiosity. And once you've found the answer -- 'Oh hey, it's kind of neat,' or 'Oh my, I'm on the edge of convulsions,' or 'Oh my, I went to sleep' -- you've answered the question."
But the Shulgins' days of experimenting with 2C-T-7 and chemicals like it are behind them. After five decades of fascination with lab-made synthetics, Sasha Shulgin has turned his attention to botanicals, in specific a rather unexplored type of cactus alkaloid called isoquinolines. The hill behind the Farm is speckled with more than one hundred cactus plants, and the beakers in his lab are now lined with a sludgy olive-green residue. He's at work on the manuscript for a third book, one the couple jokingly refers to as QIHKAL.
"Most of the cacti out there are not known by anybody to do anything," says Ann, indicating the hillside slope. "It's all new," agrees Sasha Shulgin, who very excitedly pulls down one of the many notebooks from his laboratory shelf and opens it to a page in which he has pasted a jagged graph: a mass spectrometer printout of the chemical makeup of one species of cactus. Each peak represents a compound in need of a name and analysis, a compound that might turn out to do something new and unusual and previously unobserved.
"And you don't know what it will do," Ann adds gently, in a tone that's half statement, half question.
“I’m going to find out as much as I can,” says Sasha, smiling broadly. “That’s my whole art.”
http://eastbayexpress.com/
Japans Psychedelic Summer – September 2002 Psychedelic Summer
By Newsweek - Thursday September 5 2002
Copyright: Newsweek
Long known for its no-nonsense drug enforcement, Japan is in the midst of a psychedelic summer.
The man behind the counter, who calls himself Carlos, offers a baggie full of dried Mexican sage. "Just like pot," he says, "only more hallucinations." In his head shop, located on the eighth floor of a nondescript building, kids too young to drive peruse blown-glass pipes and Moroccan hookahs. A display case holds eight metal saucers with different powders fashionable at raves and clubs the world over. One of them, called alpha-methyltryptamine, or AMT, "is just like mushrooms," Carlos offers. Another, blue mystic, reputedly mimics the effects of ecstasy and LSD.
Amsterdam? Maybe. But Tokyo? Long known for its no-nonsense drug enforcement, Japan is in the midst of a psychedelic summer. Most of the fantasy fuels remain legal because of loopholes in local drug laws. Even contraband is easily procured. Nearly every weekend barefoot ravers flock to the slopes of Mount Fuji to trip all night and view the peak at dawn. Could this be the country that jailed Paul McCartney in 1980 for stashing marijuana in his guitar case? Or recently threatened to bar Argentine football legend and convicted cocaine user Diego Maradona from entering the country to comment on the World Cup finals? None other, according to fliers for trance-music shows and new magazines that explain how best to cultivate and score various chemicals. One cover line captures the mood perfectly. It reads: drug happy brain!
The party was supposed to end on June 6, when Japan's Health Ministry banned "magic mushrooms." The fungus had been traded freely for more than a decade due to a loophole in the 1990 Narcotics Control Law that banned the sale of its active ingredient, psilocybin, but not commerce in the 'shrooms themselves. The oversight remained a secret guarded by aging hippies until the late 1990s, when head shops and street vendors sprouted up in Tokyo to peddle mushrooms for profit. Then came the overdoses, media attention and eventual revision of the law. But that has done little to stop the kids or the chemists. The Health Ministry's exasperation was apparent when it issued a statement in April saying, "The methods of abuse have become diverse and ingenious, and we can make no guess about how we should respond to that."
A cornucopia of mind-bending substances remain legal in Japan. Rave enthusiasts go for variants of ecstasy and mushrooms. Three thousand yen, or about $25, garners 15 milligrams of AMT, which users snort cocaine style or drink with liquid. For one of Japan's cheapest highs, teenagers opt for an amber liquid marketed variously as warp speed, rave or hop. But real bargain hunters buy it in its original form as VCR head cleaner. Blue mystic, a.k.a. tweetybird mescaline, will be added to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's list of controlled substances this week after being linked to several deaths in the States. It remains legal in Japan.
The popularity of legal hallucinogens hasn't dented a thriving illicit-drug trade. Most addicts in Japan inhale solvents or pop methamphetamines, called shabu . A recent U.S. government survey of drug trends in Asia estimated that more than 2 million Japanese use shabu, and some 600,000 are hooked. In Shibuya, Tokyo's supreme teen hangout, dealers sell pot and cocaine on the street with scant fear of arrest. Keiji Oda, founder of the Guardian Angels in Japan, estimates that dealers sell upwards of $50,000 worth of drugs every night on a single block of the neighborhood. Cops are hamstrung when it comes to making actual arrests, says Hiroshi Kubo, a journalist in Tokyo: "Because of laws, police cannot search drug dealers without consent."
By all accounts, Tokyo's drug culture is in full bloom. The marijuana leaf now competes with Hello Kitty for T-shirt space in teenage closets. Drug imagery has crept into rap lyrics. And among today's trendiest bands are acts like AMT and the Dope Fiends. In one downtown McDonald's recently, three teenage boys prepared to toke a marijuana substitute in a nearby park. One, sporting a David Beckham Mohawk, betrayed a nervousness he shared with his friends. "We don't know what it's going to do to us," he said. With the marketplace for drugs moving faster than government officials, Japan's teenagers will still be experimenting long after summer has gone.
http://www.newsweek.com/
Irrational Fear of ECSTASY, Not Real Danger, Inspires Measure – September 2002 High Anxiety: Irrational Fear of Ecstasy, Not Real Danger, Inspires Measure
By Daily Journal - Thursday September 5 2002
Copyright: Daily Journal
During the 1980s, in every election year, the U.S. government enacted new anti-drug laws. But in the 1990s, as the costs from the election-year drug-war pandering began to come due, we thankfully did not build on those mistakes. This year, the big drug fear is ecstasy (MDMA). The U.S. Senate seems to be rushing toward enacting an election-year anti-ecstasy bill. The bill is called the Reducing Americans Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act of 2002 (S2633) (the RAVE Act).
The RAVE Act already has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee - without any hearings and without a recorded vote. Its sponsor, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE), the author of many of the extreme drug-war measures of the 1980s - wants the full Senate to vote by unanimous consent, avoiding a recorded vote. A brief look at this bill indicates that it has not received careful attention; it is based on exaggerated fears of ecstasy and is sloppily written.
Deaths due to ecstasy are rare. The federal government reports a total of 27 deaths over five years from ecstasy. (In contrast, 85 people died in 1999 from taking acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.) Many ecstacy deaths could have been prevented by controlling two major factors that contribute to injuries or fatalities in conjunction with the use of MDMA: heat and dehydration. If concert venues had increased ventilation to reduce heat and provided easy access to water, it is quite likely that some of these deaths would not have occurred. Unfortunately, the RAVE Act would make these problems worse, as such actions would be used to prove a violation of the law.
MDMA "episodes" at hospital emergency rooms are still near almost trivial levels. According to the government, there were 636 MDMA-related emergency room episodes - and 2,214 in which MDMA was used in combination with other drugs. This is out of a total of 554,932 emergency room drug episodes in 1999.
Some anti-drug officials are exaggerating - either by accident or deliberately - ecstasy's lethal consequences. The Orlando Sentinel analyzed a report on deaths due to ecstasy issued by the "drug czar" of Florida, James McDonough, and a former top aid to Gen. Barry McCaffrey at Office of National Drug Control Policy. The article found almost unbelievable exaggerations; persons who actually died of cancer, elderly persons dying in nursing homes and toddlers dying in hospitals were reported as ecstasy deaths. Even people who died after being hit by a car were among those counted, even though these people were known to have died of other causes.
The British House of Commons appointed a special committee to study the problem of drug abuse in Britain. Great Britain is a useful source of information, since ecstasy has been common there since the early 1980s. The term "rave" originated in Britain, and Britain now has two decades of experience with widespread use of ecstasy.
The report noted that the Police Foundation Independent Inquiry (a recent study by the independent Police Foundation, a charity chaired by Prince Charles) consulted members of the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Faculty of Substance Misuse about the relative harmfulness of controlled drugs and found that ecstasy "may be several thousand times less dangerous than heroin ... there is little evidence of craving or withdrawal compared with the opiates and cocaine."
The RAVE Act re-enforces America's mistaken approach to controlling ecstasy by relying on law enforcement rather than on effective education. An important article in the Journal of the American Medical Association highlighted this criticism of the law enforcement-dominated approach and recommends honest education, not scare tactics.
JAMA notes: "ehavioral researchers are recommending control strategies that may seem antithetical to ever-expanding law enforcement efforts. Instead of focusing on eradication and punishment, these social scientists take another tack: they encourage harm reduction that acknowledges the realities of Ecstasy." JAMA recommends truth, not fear - education not incarceration.
The RAVE bill itself is profoundly overbroad in its sweep. It provides for severe criminal penalties for conduct carried out exclusively by another person. Business owners should be concerned about this bill, especially landlords or property owners. The bill makes landlords, theater owners and operators - indeed, any property owner - criminally and civilly liable for the conduct of other people on their property if that other person uses illegal drugs. The bill would assign liability to anyone who has a relative who uses illegal drugs in their home or on their property.
The bill creates a new crime requiring only a state of mind of "knowingly" for the conduct of those who "open, lease, rent, use or maintain any place, whether permanently or temporarily, for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, or using any controlled substance." According to this provision, if a landlord knowingly (the phrase "intentionally" is not included in this new crime) made a lease with someone or knowingly gave someone the right to enter their property, then the property owner could be liable.
This new crime creates an impossible burden for any property owner. Property owners allow people on their land to visit, establish homes, spend the night, camp, shop, swim, bicycle and listen to music; sometimes people who enter the premises use drugs. Owners can maintain some level of security, but they can never stop most persons who enter from smoking pot or taking illegal pills if those persons desire to do so and sneak the drugs in. Certainly the government cannot expect theaters, campgrounds or homeowners to institute the kind of security that we see at the airports or the border - and people still smuggle in drugs at those locations. Landlords and property managers are not police. And that is the way it should be in a free country.
Considering the ease with which someone could innocently run afoul of this new law, the penalty, of up to 20 years in prison - more than for being a drug trafficker in many instances - seems excessively harsh. The bill also authorizes the government to charge the property owner civilly, using a much lower standard of proof, denying accused property owners the right to trial by jury and obtaining a civil fine of $250,000.
There are very serious collateral penalties that exist with drug offenses like those created by the RAVE Act. These include: criminal forfeiture of property, a presumption against bail and the use of such a conviction as an aggravating factor to authorize the death penalty if, on some future occasion, the accused is charged with homicide. Not only would a person convicted not be able to acquire a firearm, but also, because it is a serious drug offense, the person would face a mandatory 15 years for a gun violation.
We have seen how unexamined drug scares and election-year drug legislation can do more harm than good. Do we really want to repeat that mistake again? Hopefully, the Senate will ignore Biden and not enact a law that we will regret later.
http://www.dailyjournal.com/
Is the War on Drugs Turning Into A War on raves? – September 2002 Is the War on Drugs Turning Into A War on Raves?
By MSNBC - Thursday September 5 2002
Copyright: MSNBC
IT’S HARDLY the first time that a particular drug has been associated with a particular type of music. In the 1920s, jazz was associated with marijuana. In the 1960s, rock music was linked with marijuana use and LSD. And in the disco era of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the prevalent drug was cocaine. Still, no one ever tried to pass a law that seemed to target the music more than the drugs. That is, critics say, until now.
During recent Congressional hearings on the drug MDMA, more commonly known as Ecstasy, raves were mentioned time and again as places where the drug was most prevalent. Too often, lawmakers found, parents are unaware that raves-often promoted as alcohol-free dance parties-aren’t always safe places for their children. As the number of news reports of teenagers dying from Ecstasy overdoses continues to grow, some lawmakers decided to act. The result is two bills moving through Congress that aim to hold promoters responsible for drug use at their events.
When word got out about these two proposals, it traveled fast. Washington D.C.-based rave promoters, Buzzlife Productions, leapt right into action and organized an online petition against both bills. In just five days, the group had collected 10,000 signatures. At last count, about 20,000 people had signed it.
Amanda Huie, director of public relations for Buzzlife Productions says she’s all for cracking down on drugs. But these two new proposals, she says, seem more designed to crack down on legal raves than on illegal drugs. Rave organizers such as Huie take issue with lawmakers defining a rave simply as a place to do Ecstasy.
Huie defines a rave simply as a massive dance party held in an environment designed to provide a sensory overload of loud music, pulsing beats and flashing lights. “Take a club and subtract the dress code. Take a concert and add a dance floor. Take a family reunion and remove the baggage, that’s kind of what a rave is,” says Huie.
Perhaps most significantly, raves are the only consistent venues where electronic music fans can go to dance to music spun by the top techno, industrial and house music DJs. This is why First Amendment advocates oppose the bills. They claim that specifically targeting raves will effectively silence the music associated with a dance scene. That, say bill critics such as the American Civil Liberties Union, violates the right to freedom of expression. Huie describes it as “musical genocide as drug control. It’s like going after hip hop as a form of gun control.”
These new proposals, rave promoters and enthusiasts say, expands the war on drugs to a war on raves. Existing drug laws, critics of the bills say, should be more than sufficient to address the problem of drug abuse. The Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act, passed in October 2000, for instance, has already strengthened the penalties for dealing in Ecstasy and increased funding for drug education programs. These new proposals, they say, merely threaten legitimate businesses. Lawmakers say that’s not their intent. They say that as long as raves are run by people who aren’t promoting them as places to do drugs, or where drug use will be tolerated, rave organizers have nothing to fear.
TOO MUCH MISINFORMATION?
Are rave enthusiasts over-reacting? The bills’ supporters think so. The first bill is a Senate proposal known as Reducing Americans Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act of 2002 (or the RAVE Act). It aims to close loopholes in the so-called “crack-house law.” The crack house law allows property owners to be prosecuted for any illegal drug use on their property. But the law only applies to ongoing illegal drug activity that occurs inside a building.
In recent years, prosecutors have tried to use the crack house law against rave organizers. But because raves are often held outdoors, and often are one-night only affairs, the law doesn’t apply in all cases. Bill proponents say the RAVE bill would make the crack house law easier for law enforcement to use against rave organizers who promote or condone drug use.
Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) sponsored the RAVE act. According to Biden’s staff, there’s a lot of misinformation surrounding the Senate proposal. “We’re not trying to take away people’s right to dance,” says Chip Unruh, Sen. Joseph Biden’s deputy press secretary. “We don’t think people should be able to profit from selling drugs to kids.”
The RAVE bill, Biden’s staff says, simply tweaks the existing crack-house law. It is very specific and intended to be used only against property owners whose behavior clearly breaks the drug laws. “We set the bar very high,” says Unruh. “We only go after the worst of the worst.”
The second proposal is a House bill called Clean, Learn, Education, Abolish, Neutralize, and Undermine Production (CLEAN-UP) of Methamphetamines Act of 2002. Sponsored by Congressman Doug Ose (R-California), it would amend the Controlled Substances Act to set penalties for “promoting an entertainment event where the promoter knows that a controlled substance will be used or distributed in violation of specified law.” CLEAN-UP’s critics say the wording is so vague it could cover any event from a rock concert to a campus pep rally.
According to Ose’s press secretary, Yier Shi, its vagueness is intentional. “Our whole objective is to give law enforcement as much authority as possible,” says Shi. “The only people liable when there’s drug use at an event are users and owners of property. We feel there are times when the promoters are just as responsible. We want to give law enforcement the leeway to crack down as much as possible.”
Critics fear the House bill would have a chilling effect on all forms of public entertainment. Both Sen. Biden and Congressman Ose have been hearing from concert promoters in every musical genre. And their staff is fielding a lot of hypothetical questions. For instance, suppose a college promotes a spring break concert. Would knowing that surveys and studies have shown drug abuse to be a problem on campuses across the country make the college liable for any student drug use under these new laws?
“Hopefully law enforcement will use good judgment,” says Shi.
IS GOVERNMENT GOING TOO FAR?
A New Orleans case, however, suggests battlefronts in the war on drugs aren’t always carefully thought out. A New Orleans rave promoter was prosecuted using the “crack-house” act in August 2001. As a result of the case, federal law enforcement banned masks, glow sticks and pacifiers as drug paraphernalia. Law enforcement officers said glow sticks were used to enhance the effects of Ecstasy by dancers and claimed that people on Ecstasy clamp down on the pacifiers to reduce teeth clenching, a side effect of the drug.
On February 4, 2002, U.S. District Judge G. Thomas Porteous struck down that ban. Porteous agreed that government has a legitimate interest in trying to stop illegal drug use. But, he said, the government didn’t have the right to ban obviously legal items just because a few people use them to heighten the effects of an illegal substance.
“When the First Amendment right of Free Speech is violated by the government in the name of the War on Drugs, and when that First Amendment violation is arguably not even helping in the War on Drugs, it is the duty of the courts to enjoin (stop) the government from violating the rights of innocent people,” Porteous said.
Of course, under the proposed laws, providing music is not a criminal act; providing an environment in which illegal drugs are used is. But, as Huie points out, the government can’t keep drugs out of prisons, so what chance do rave promoters, or any concert promoters for that matter, have of making their events entirely drug-free? During the New Orleans rave trial, attorneys for the defense argued that “Knowing that no concert provider can guarantee the complete absence of drugs, the only way to avoid criminal liability would be to cancel electronic music concerts altogether.”
And that is really what those opposed to these bills fear. While lawmakers say it’s not their intent to put a stop to all raves, their proposals may ultimately have that effect. Fearing prosecution if anyone at their events uses drugs, would-be rave promoters may think twice before organizing such events. And property owners may decide not to rent out their land or buildings to accommodate raves. All these fears may be unfounded, but electronic music fans and rave enthusiasts worry that their scene will disappear.
If these now mainstream all-night dance parties are driven back underground, however, there may be other causes for concern. In California, a law passed after a young man died at a rave requires that all raves be run as safely as possible. As a result, most raves offer tight security, onsite emergency medical care, “chill” rooms for cooling off, and water for sale or for free. If the raves move back underground, there’s no guarantee any of these safety considerations will be met.
The House and the Senate will take up both proposals for consideration and action when the full Congress returns from the August recess.
http://www.msnbc.com/
The secret life of ECSTASY – August 2002 The secret life of ECSTASY
By The Green Party - Monday, July 29, 2002
Copyright: The Green Party
You may have seen a new anti-ecstasy billboard sporting myriad ecstasy pills and the caption 'which onE is the killer?' Well it may have something to do with the country you're in, not the pill itself.
Scare tactics are no good if clubs can lose their licence for allowing official pill testing and harm reduction is seen as 'giving in to the drugs war'
In the UK there have been around 80 deaths attributed to Ecstasy. In the same period, there were between 20-30 deaths in the Netherlands - but even the Dutch aren't sure if that many deaths were due to Ecstasy itself.
As the Trimbos Institute (Netherlands Institute of Addiction) say, 'the exact number of deaths related to the use of amphetamines and ecstasy is unclear. In the Cause of Death statistics of the CBS these substances rarely occur as underlying causes of death. Over the past 10 years no more than 1 to 3 acute deaths per year were involved.' In plain English, they are saying that so few people have problems with Ecstasy that they're not sure if it's a killer in itself.
So why do far fewer people die in the Netherlands from Ecstasy use? It may be due to the Dutch policy of harm reduction for all drugs. In the case of Ecstasy, it means 'ecstacy' pill testing in clubs as well as public warning from their health ministry when potentially lethal 'ecstasy' pills are discovered in circulation.
So does Ecstasy have the potential to kill? Ask the scientists and they will tell you that the LD50 (lethal dose that killed 50% of a group of rats/mice) of MDMA is 97mg/kg, ie. a person weighing 170kg would have to take around 150 Ecstasy pills or more before death occurred. However this is taken from the animal world and if you read the small print, you will see that the doses were administered IP, that is, injected into the membrane that holds the major organs together.
In the human world, there is anecdotal evidence that large amounts of Ecstasy can be consumed orally with no apparent long term effects. There are several instances of people consuming hundreds of pills and living to tell the tale.
So why is Ecstasy thought of as being such a big killer in the UK? There are three possible reasons, which relate to poor provision of resources for drug takers in clubs.
First of all, many clubs still do not have proper ventilation, running cold water and 'chill out' areas to prevent heatstroke, a major cause of death for Ecstasy users in the UK.
Secondly, the 'Barry Legg Act' effectively means that a club that allows Ecstasy testing can have its license taken away - the police can use Ecstasy testing as 'proof' of drug taking and have a venue shut down for good. This means a greater chance of consuming non-MDMA substances like DOB, DXM and PMA which really can be lethal.
Thirdly, the UK Government do not follow Dutch practice and publicise the discovery of lethal 'ecstasy' pills - the National Poisons Unit will test pills and pass data onto people like the police, but Joe Public is kept in the dark. Luckily, it's legal to own an Ecstasy Testing Kit in the UK.
Used correctly, MDMA doesn't necessarily have to be a killer at all - certainly in comparison with tobacco and alcohol, which kill many hundreds of thousands every year. More research into safety is needed.
http://www.greenparty.org.uk/
The ECSTASY Capital of the World The Ecstasy capital of the world
Most of the world's Ecstasy is produced in the Netherlands, and yet despite the government's best efforts to combat the production and trafficking of the drug, the Ecstasy party shows no sign of abating.
What is Ecstasy?
Perhaps traumatised by being rather unflatteringly christened Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) when invented around 1912, the little pill has adopted many pseudonyms since, including XTC, Ecstasy, E and the love drug in its search for acceptance.
The little pill, with its disproportionate stimulant and hallucinogenic properties, hit the big time when the "rave" clubbing craze started in the mid 1980s.
Its advocates say Ecstasy produces positive feelings, empathy for others, extreme relaxation and eliminates anxiety.
It also suppresses the need to eat, drink or sleep, allowing users to dance all night.
Opponents say it can lead to exhaustion and dehydration, brain damage and death. Indeed, some users have "drowned" themselves by drinking too much water while trying to compensate for the dehydrating effect of dancing frantically for hours.
The drug is illegal.
The drug party that doesn't end
The Dutch government is working hard to dispel the image that it tolerates hard drugs. However, the fact remains that the Drug Enforcement Administration in the US cites the Netherlands as the world's primary producer of the party-drug Ecstasy .
Every week, about 2 million Dutch Ecstasy pills are smuggled into the US and Ecstasy is the drug of choice for revellers in dance clubs all across Europe and America. Foreign governments, and the US government in particular are none too pleased about this at all and they never miss an opportunity to criticise Holland.
The United Nations-inspired International Narcotics Control Board also singled the Netherlands in its 2000 annual report as the bad boy of Europe when it comes to drugs production and smuggling.
But there is nothing like a good police raid to show how seriously the fight against Ecstasy is being taken.
In one month alone (March 2002), the Dutch police tell us they have broken up two major Ecstasy gangs. One was in the north of the country where three men, including two company directors, were arrested and about 100,000 Ecstasy pills seized. Investigators also found a truck containing thousands of litres of chemical ingredients, enough to make a few million more Ecstasy pills.
About a week later, Rotterdam detectives arrested nine people allegedly involved in another ring smuggling Ecstasy to the US. About 18 kilos of Ecstasy were seized.
The investigation started a few weeks earlier following a tip from the public prosecutors office in Belgium. Two couriers were arrested in Belgium with kilos of Ecstasy hidden in a specially doctored suitcase.
Police operations like these make for good news and give the impression the Netherlands has the Ecstasy gangs on the run. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The police closed down about 38 production centres back in 1998 but the party goes on and on. When the police close down one laboratory, you can be sure two more open somewhere else.
The Netherlands declares war on Ecstasy
There are a number of reasons why the production of Ecstasy is centred in the Netherlands. Firstly, The Netherlands has long been a hub for international trade and transport.
Secondly, the country is traditionally tolerant when it comes to drugs. The cannabis coffee shops are an integral part of country's tourist industry. Perhaps, says the government, but we take hard drugs seriously and keep them out of the coffee shops.
Certainty things have changed since the early 1960s when amphetamines were not a controlled substance in the Netherlands and were produced by Dutch gangs for export to Scandinavia and the UK.
It was easy for the gangs to switch to Ecstasy production when the dance craze took off in the late 1980s.
The government finally made the war on Ecstasy a priority back in 1996. It set up a special police taskforce, the Synthetic Drugs Unit (USD), and set about closing down the Ecstasy plants. It all sounded very Elliot Ness; that is, until the presentation of the USD's annual report last year.
Public prosecutor Martin Witteveen said the unit did not have enough officers to follow up on many of the leads received from foreign police forces about the activities of Ecstasy gangs here. And focusing on one case sometimes necessitated officers being taken off another case, he said.
When the justice department catches a gang, it asks the courts to impose a heavy penalty. Unfortunately, what the Netherlands, and many other European countries, consider to be a heavy sentence can be likened to a slap on the wrist in places like the US and Britain.
Take the tale of the two disk jockeys. An Irish DJ was jailed for three years after he was caught with over 30,000 Ecstasy pills in Amsterdam. The court heard he was part of an international gang that smuggled Ecstasy to the US and Britain.
In contrast, a DJ from Zwolle who was extradited to US in January 2002 to face Ecstasy smuggling charges faces the rest of his life behind bars if convicted.
Dealing with the drug rings
The drug gangs operating in the Netherlands are just as multinational as Philips or Royal Dutch/Shell. Eastern European and Russian "Mafia" gangs saw the potential as an international base as soon as soon as the Soviet Bloc collapsed and moved in west.
Israel has criticised Dutch police for lacklustre co-operation in dealing with a number of powerful Israeli gangs using the Netherlands as the production centre for their growing Ecstasy empires.
And Irish drug dealers - not particular whether they sell cannabis, Ecstasy or heroin - use Amsterdam as their bolthole whenever the pressure from police or other criminals gets too much at home.
There has been a lot of international co-operation in the last few years on cutting the supply of the chemicals needed to produce Ecstasy . As a result, most of the chemicals now come from China. The Dutch are reluctant to co-operate too closely with the Chinese authorities because of their poor human rights record and their liberal use of the death penalty.
The Dutch authorities acknowledge that most of the world's Ecstasy is produced here but they point out that it takes two to tango. There is a world market out there impatiently awaiting the next batch from Holland. Each pill costs EUR 0.50 to produce but sells for about EUR 4.50. That is the bottom line.
http://www.expatica.com/
ECSTASY: Penicillin for the Soul? ECSTASY: Penicillin for the soul?
Ecstasy: a lethal class-A drug responsible for numerous teenage deaths. Ecstasy: a harmless drug that provides entertainment for millions every weekend – and could save marriages. How can opinion be so divided?
Football hooliganism could hold the key to treating a range of common psychological disorders, such as chronic stress and depression. But the clue lies not with hooliganism itself but with its remarkable disappearance. Throughout the Eighties and early Nineties, the football season was a long history of violent days, with rival "firms" engaging in running battles, trashing city centres and causing severe, occasionally fatal, injuries to each other. And then, suddenly, that stopped.
Effective policing and other social factors may have played a part, but one controversial theory credits the sudden outbreak of peace to widespread use of the illegal drug Ecstasy. In his book E for Ecstasy, published in 1994 (and now available only on the internet, at www.ecstasy.org), Nicholas Saunders describes how, in the summer of 1992, "many of the hard-core lads, who had previously been beating each other up, had spent most of the summer dancing the weekends away to the sounds of house music at raves fuelled by the drug Ecstasy."
In November of that year, the day before Manchester United were due to play Manchester City in the local derby, the two rival football gangs met in a club "after necking an E". Instead of the normal violent confrontation, the young men smiled at one another happily, before adjourning to someone's house for a few joints; one commented: "Well, who'd have thought that we would be stood side by side the night before a derby game, and there's no trouble in any of us? It's weird, innit? It could never have happened before E."
At the time, no one took Saunders's ideas seriously. But in recent months there has been a shift in attitudes to the medicinal as well as the recreational properties of the drug that apparently brought love and peace to the hearts of rival football fans. Not only does Ecstasy seem to be a relatively safe drug; it may also be a valuable tool for psychiatrists treating chronic stress and depression, according to new research.
If the story sounds familiar, it's because very much the same transformation has already occurred with cannabis. Reviled until recently by police and medical authorities alike, cannabis is now set to be downgraded as a recreational drug from class B to class C. Organised clinical trials of cannabis as a painkiller and treatment for muscle spasms are likely to result in its legalisation for medicinal use in the next couple of years, says Professor Tony Moffat, chief scientist of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. There are also promising signs of its medical benefits for glaucoma, asthma, anorexia and mood disorders.
Now there are signs that Ecstasy, known in pharmaceutical circles as MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine), is due for the same treatment. In her new anthology, Ecstasy: the Complete Guide (Park Street Press, £17.99), Julie Holland, a New York psychiatrist, says that it has a substantial therapeutic history that pre-dates its popularity as a recreational drug.
First synthesised (and patented) by Merck in 1912, Ecstasy was briefly investigated by the US Army Chemical Centre in the 1950s as a potential brainwashing tool. It came into its own, however, in the late Seventies, when it became widely used by several hundred psychotherapists attached to the Esalen Institute in California, four out of five of whom believed that it had "substantial potential as an adjunct to the psychotherapy process", according to subsequent research.
Known as "penicillin for the soul", MDMA, which works on two brain chemicals, serotonin and dopamine (essentially combining the effects of Prozac-type antidepressants and amphetamines), "induces a gentle and subtle shift in consciousness", says Dr Holland. It "makes painful psychotherapy easier and faster, like anaesthesia given during surgery to allow for deeper incisions and removal of more malignant material."
The gathering of evidence of the drug's major therapeutic benefits, however, came to an abrupt halt in 1984. At the beginning of the Eighties, "MDMA, the therapeutic tool, leaked out into the general community to become Ecstasy, the party drug", and a worried US Drug Enforcement Agency overruled a substantial pro-MDMA research lobby and placed it in the most restrictive category of controlled substances. Medical research was banned. Meanwhile, in Britain alone, up to two million people partied on it every weekend.
But the therapeutic MDMA lobby is persistent. A key activist, Dr Rick Doblin, gained a drugs policy PhD at Harvard and set up the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (or MAPS – www.maps.org) to lobby for and fund research into the medical use of MDMA. With one trial already under way in Spain, the American Food and Drug Administration approved the first US-based double-blind clinical trial of the rave drug to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in November 2001 – and there are plans in the pipeline to test MDMA's potential to support treatment for marital problems, depression and even schizophrenia. Further research, testing a form of the drug as a treatment for Parkinson's disease, is also under way at the school of biological sciences at Manchester University.
It's a remarkable about-turn, considering that the US government has, in the past two years, stiffened legal penalties for possession and stepped up efforts to publicise the dangers of Ecstasy; according to New Scientist magazine, Ecstasy offences are now "being punished more harshly in the US than those involving heroin".
A major focus of the pro-Ecstasy campaign has been to overturn the persistent media image of the drug as a potential killer and a cause of brain damage. Enthusiasts have no problem in finding evidence that refutes that graphically. Saunders used government statistics to substantiate his claim that taking Ecstasy – with around five related deaths a year at the time – carries about the same risk as fishing and horse-riding. Current figures of about 27 Ecstasy-related deaths a year are still lower than those for glue-sniffing and over-the-counter painkillers – and seem to be linked to a little-understood and extremely rare reaction called serotonin syndrome.
Intriguingly, the very experts who drew attention to Ecstasy as a potential killer have also supported the move to have it clinically tested as a therapeutic entity.
Dr John Henry, director of the National Poisons Information Service at Guy's Hospital, was the first to catalogue the risks of overheating at Ecstasy-fuelled raves, as well as the possibly greater risk of drinking too much water. But he is critical of media coverage of the drug's safety record. "The sensationalising of the deaths of two young women, one in England and another in Australia, which may have been related to hyponatremia [a low concentration of sodium in the blood] associated with drinking too much water after Ecstasy use, clearly illustrates a desire to sell newspapers rather than cogently inform," he says in a piece included in Ecstasy: the Complete Guide. "Intuitively, we know that the incidence of adverse outcomes is low, since emergency departments are not being overrun each weekend by people dying from Ecstasy use. It is the manner in which MDMA is used that poses the greatest danger to the patient."
One of the most effective weapons of the anti-Ecstasy lobby, used repeatedly on TV and in magazines, has been a set of coloured images taken from brain scans, which supposedly show that repeated use of the drug makes holes in the brain. But recently a detailed investigation has shown that the pictures are based on unreliable and inaccurate science. The original study from John Hopkins University, published in The Lancet in October 1998, used inaccurate measurement probes and was selective in the data it published. Subsequent tests of mental agility show that Ecstasy users perform as well as non-users.
So, if Ecstasy is largely safe, why criminalise it? That was the question posed at the Cheltenham Festival of Science last month, at which the "godfather of Ecstasy", Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin, appeared alongside weighty academics such as the pharmacologist Les Iversen and Colin Blakemore, chairman of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, on a platform calling for a change to drug laws.
Shulgin is a chemist with an academic career at the University of California. His research work over the past 40 years has involved designing, synthesising and evaluating psychedelic drugs. He was the man who published the chemical formula for MDMA in 1965 and wrote up the first paper on its therapeutic use.
While Profs Iversen and Blakemore stressed the lack of scientific evidence to support the law against cannabis, Shulgin went further and called for a repeal of the criminalisation of all drugs, with better drug safety brought about by "getting honest information out there, openly available to everyone, to build up a public awareness of the health problems that might be associated with drug use". Ecstasy, he said, "should be used only with access to medical advice".
There are cogent arguments for using the drug only within a therapeutic setting. Its effect reduces with use, and the so-called love effect, achieved when it floods the brain with far higher levels of serotonin than Prozac-type drugs can, stops working if the drug is used regularly, because of changes to the brain.
As the psychiatrist George Greer, medical director of the Heffter Research Institute, points out in Ecstasy: the Complete Guide, people do not necessarily change while on MDMA. "There's no guarantee that problems will be resolved. It all depends on the individuals and their intention, their willingness to work it out." The role of the MDMA therapist (usually someone who has taken the drug) is "to guide the person through a task that needs to be accomplished", says Dr Holland – "otherwise there's a risk that you'll just admire the beautiful wallpaper."
A five-year MAPS plan to introduce MDMA as a therapy in the States envisages its use as a drug taken under the supervision of a therapist. Instead of following the conventional Western medical model, which treats healing drugs as something to be administered on a daily schedule, the therapeutic use of Ecstasy should be an experience "shared by doctor and patient together", says the Californian psychologist Dr Ralph Metzner. "This model is much closer to that followed in traditional people's healing ceremonies."
In other words, if Ecstasy does follow cannabis on to the prescription pad, it could change the whole basis on which psychiatrist and client relate to each other. Anyone who says that couldn't happen might do well to remember that Manchester football derby of 1992.
http://www.independent.co.uk/
Swiss help for HEROIN addicts – February 2002 Swiss help for heroin addicts
By BBC News - Saturday, 9 February, 2002
Copyright: BBC News
Switzerland, which once had the highest rates of heroin addiction and HIV in Europe, practises a radical policy of harm reduction for its drug addicts. Imogen Foulkes reports from Zurich.
The Platzspitz park in Zurich is an oasis of calm greenery in the heart of the city.
But 10 years ago, it was better known as needle park. Hundreds of addicts came here to buy heroin, and inject it openly.
It was a horrifying spectacle, and, 10 years ago this week, Swiss police drove the addicts out of needle park.
But that does not mean the addicts have gone away. Some are patients on Switzerland's heroin prescription programme. It is controversial, but it has got some hard facts on its side.
"Our patients have achieved more stable lifestyles, their health has improved, and some even have jobs," says Dr Daniel Meili, who is in charge of Zurich's programme. "And many of these people have hepatitis, or are HIV positive. If they didn't get heroin here, they'd be out on the street."
Dr Meili is so concerned about the health dangers of being an addict on the street, that he would like to widen the heroin programme, and even prescribe other narcotics, such as cocaine.
To see what it means to be a drug addict on the street, you only have to walk a few blocks from the heroin prescription centre to one of Zurich's injection rooms.
Here, addicts who buy their drugs illegally can come to get a clean needle, and inject under the supervision of trained staff.
Safe haven
Robert Reithauer, the social worker in charge, opens his doors once an hour to let the addicts in.
He greets them all by name. They are mainly young people, but they look old.
Painfully thin, many walk with sticks _ the legacy of the dreadful abscesses which injecting with dirty needles can cause.
Robert has a table laid out with steel dishes. Each contains a clean syringe and a ticket with a number.
This is so the addicts can take turns in the injection room in an orderly manner _ many are desperately impatient for their fix.
I spot one young woman who stands out from the rest. She is not so thin, her red hair is shiny, and I think she may be somehow less of an addict, more saveable perhaps, than the others.
She waits in line, jigging from foot to foot. Meanwhile Robert shows me Zurich's latest offer to the addicts: a smoking room where heroin, cocaine, or even crack can be consumed.
"There are many people who mix heroin and cocaine," Robert explains, "and they just can't give it up. So we thought a way of reaching them and offering help would be to open a smokers room."
The room itself borders on the surreal. It has a powerful air conditioning system, Robert points out, so that he and his staff will not be overcome by the fumes.
There is an industrial size roll of aluminium foil on the wall - an essential element for cooking up a fix.
London addict
A young man is about to go in. He is from London originally, and he describes Switzerland as "a paradise for drug users".
"But seriously," he says, "if I didn't come here I'd be on the streets, or hiding in the public toilets, and the police would get me."
Robert Reithauer, however, does not think his job is providing shelter from the police.
"OK they get a clean safe place to take their drugs, but what we want is contact with them. Without contact we can't help.
"Here, they can talk to me, or see our doctor," he says. "And you know quite often I see people today, just out shopping, who used to come here, and they are off drugs now. They have happy, normal lives. We helped them achieve that.
"If I didn't think I could do that, I wouldn't work here."
It is 12 o'clock, and Robert opens his doors again. The girl with the shiny red hair is first in the queue.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
COCA farmers protest spraying – August 2001 Coca farmers protest spraying
By RNW.nl - August 2001
Copyright: RNW.nl
On Thursday, Colombian farmers blockaded important routes in protest against the spraying of illegal coca plantations. Last week, a judge in the southern Colombian province of Putumayo declared himself opposed to the spraying, and imposed a suspension in that province. But the Colombian anti-drugs unit, a government body, refuses to cease the spraying of illegal coca plantations. The Colombian government has invested a lot of money and effort in the fight against drugs, and is being assisted by the United States.
For the past ten years, the US has sprayed illegal coca crops in Colombia using a toxic herbicide called glyphosa. However, the harmful effects of glyphosa are coming to light. Several farmers in the Putumayo have been suffering from serious skin infections and lung problems. Some of them have now taken the matter to court. And last week, a judge ruled that the irrigation of the crops must stop until the Colombian government has investigated the effects of the chemicals used.
Thorn in the Side:
The suspension of crop irrigation is a thorn in the side of the United States. Last year, America invested 1.3 billion dollars in its war on drugs in Colombia. Ninety per cent of the cocaine that enters the US is produced in Colombia. The coca plantations are situated in the southern Amazon region, where the guerrilla movement FARC is highly active. This Marxist rebel movement forces the coca farmers to relinquish a percentage of the profit they make from the sale of coca. Because the region is impenetrable, spraying the plantations from small aircraft, under the protection of US helicopters, seems to be the only effective way to destroy the coca production.
Criticism:
Numerous accounts of the harmful effects of the war on drugs programme have only enhanced criticism of the Colombian government. The United Nations and the National Ombudsman agree with the ruling of the judge in the Putumayo region. They feel that apart from the pending health hazard to the indigenous people, the policy of irrigation is missing its goal. Coca farmers are moving their poppy plantations even further into the jungle. And further research has shown that the amount of coca is increasing.
Local administrators, like the governor of Putumayo, hope that the ruling will open up negotiations about alternatives. Small farmers have said they are willing to destroy the coca crops by hand, if in return they receive reasonable financial compensation. Earlier, they received an amount of $1000, which was not enough. Furthermore, administrators are requesting an investigation into other crops that are being cultivated in the Amazon.
US Concerns:
The US fears that the suspension of the irrigation programme will lead to an expansion of the cultivation of coca. Controlling the cultivation of coca is very difficult, and destroying the plantations by hand is a long and obscure process. But the free market mechanism is the largest dilemma. As long as demand in the US remains high, Colombia will supply coca. America would be better off investing its dollars in reducing the demand at home.
http://www.rnw.nl/
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